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FRENCH WAYS 
AND THEIR MEANING 



" FRENCH WAYS 
AND THEIR MEANING 



BY 



EDITH WHARTON 

AUTHOR OF "the REEF," "SUMMER," "THE MARNE" AND 

"the house of mirth" 




D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK LONDON 

1919 



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COPYEIGHT, 19 19, BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPAI>[Y 

Copyright, 1918, 1919, by 

INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPAN 



PRINTED IN TBE UNITED ^STATES Oy AMERICA 



©CI.A529775 ' 



PREFACE 

This book is essentially a desultory book, 
the result of intermittent observation, and 
often, no doubt, of rash assumption. Having 
been written in Paris, at odd moments, during 
the last two years of the war, it could hardly 
be more than a series of disjointed notes; and 
the excuse for its publication lies in the fact 
that the very conditions which made more con- 
secutive work impossible also gave unprece- 
dented opportunities for quick notation. 

The world since 1914 has been like a house 
on fire. All the lodgers are on the stairs, in 
dishabille. Their doors are swinging wide, 
and one gets glimpses of their furniture, reve- 
lations of their habits, and whiffs of their 
cooking, that a life-time of ordinary inter- 
course would not offer. Superficial differ- 
ences vanish, and so (how much oftener) do 
superficial resemblances; while deep unsus- 



yi Preface 

pected similarities and disagreements, deep 
common attractions and repulsions, declare 
themselves. It is of these fundamental sub- 
stances that the new link between France and 
America is made, and some reasons for the 
strength of the link ought to be discoverable 
in the suddenly bared depths of the French 
heart. 

There are two ways of judging a foreign 
people : at first sight, impressionistically, in the 
manner of the passing traveller; or after resi- 
dence among them, ^^soberly, advisedly," and 
with all the vain precautions enjoined in an- 
other grave contingency. 

Of the two ways, the first is, even in ordi- 
nary times, often the most fruitful. The ob- 
server, if he has eyes and an imagination, will 
be struck first by the superficial dissemblances, 
and they will give his picture the sharp sug- 
gestiveness of a good caricature. If he settles 
down among the objects of his study he will 
gradually become blunted to these dissem- 
blances, or, if he probes below the surface, he 



Preface vii 

will find them sprung from the same stem as 
many different-seeming characteristics of his 
own people. A period of confusion must fol- 
low, in which he will waver between contra- 
dictions, and his sharp outlines will become 
blurred with what the painters call "repen- 
tances." 

From this t^vilight it is hardly possible for 
any foreigner's judgment to emerge again into 
full illumination. Race-differences strike so 
deep that when one has triumphantly pulled 
up a specimen for examination one finds only 
the crown in one's hand, and the tough root 
still clenched in some crevice of prehistory. 
And as to race-resemblances, they are so often 
most misleading when they seem most instruc- 
tive that any attempt to catch the likeness of 
another people by painting ourselves is never 
quite successful. Indeed, once the observer 
has gone beyond the happy stage when sur- 
face-differences have all their edge, his only 
chance of getting anywhere near the truth is 



viii Preface 

to try to keep to the traveller's way, and still 
see his subject in the light of contrasts. 

It is absurd for an Anglo-Saxon to say: 
^'The Latin is this or that" unless he makes the 
mental reservation, ''or at least seems so to 
me" ; but if this mental reservation is always 
implied, if it serves always as the background 
of the picture, the features portrayed may es- 
cape caricature and yet bear some resem- 
blance to the original. 

Lastly, the use of the labels "Anglo-Saxon" 
and ''Latin," for purposes of easy antithesis, 
must be defended and apologised for. 

Such use of the two terms is open to the easy 
derision of the scholar. Yet they are too con- 
venient as symbols to be abandoned, and are 
safe enough if, for instance, they are used 
simply as a loose way of drawing a line be- 
tween the peoples who drink spirits and those 
who drink wine, between those whose social 
polity dates from the Forum, and those who 
still feel and legislate in terms of the primaeval 
forest. 



Preface ix 

This use of the terms is the more justifiable 
because one may safely say that most things in 
a man's view of life depend on how many 
thousand years ago his land was deforested. 
And when, as befell our forbears, men whose 
blood is still full of murmurs of the Saxon 
Urwald and the forests of Britain are plunged 
afresh into the wilderness of a new continent, 
it is natural that in many respects they should 
be still farther removed from those whose hab- 
its and opinions are threaded through and 
through with Mediterranean culture and the 
civic discipline of Rome. 

One can imagine the first Frenchman born 
into the world looking about him confidently, 
and saying: ^'Here I am; and now, how am I 
to make the most of it?" 

The double sense of the fugacity of life, 
and of the many and durable things that may 
be put into it, is manifest in every motion of 
the French intelligence. Sooner than any 
other race the French have got rid of bogies, 
have ^'cleared the mind of shams," and gone 



X Preface 

up to the Medusa and the Sphinx with a cool 
eye and a penetrating question. 

It is an immense advantage to have the 
primaeval forest as far behind one as these 
clear-headed children of the Roman forum 
and the Greek amphitheatre; and even if they 
have lost something of the sensation "felt in 
the blood and felt along the heart" with which 
our obscurer past enriches us, it is assuredly 
more useful for them to note the deficiency 
than for us to criticise it. 

The French are the most human of the hu- 
man race, the most completely detached from 
the lingering spell of the ancient shadowy 
world in which trees and animals talked to 
each other, and began the education of the 
fumbling beast that was to deviate into Man. 
They have used their longer experience and 
their keener senses for the joy and enlighten- 
ment of the races still agrope for self-expres- 
sion. The faults of France are the faults in- 
herent in an old and excessively self-contained 
civilisation; her qualities are its qualities; and 



Preface xi 

the most profitable way of trying to interpret 
French ways and their meaning is to see how 
this long inheritance may benefit a people 
which is still, intellectually and artistically, in 
search of itself. 

Hyeres, February, 1919. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface v 

I. First Impressions 3 

11. Reverence 20 

III. Taste 39 

IV. Intellectual Honesty 57 

V. Continuity 76 

VI. The New Frenchwoman 98 

VII. In Conclusion 122 



Note. — In the last two chapters of this book I have Incorporated, 
in a modified form, the principal passages of two articles published 
by me respectively in Scrihners Magazine and in the Ladies^ Home 
Journal, the former entitled "The French as seen by an American" 
(now called "In Conclusion"), the other "The New Frenchwoman." 



FRENCH WAYS 
AND THEIR MEANING 



WRST IMPRESSIONS 



HASTY generalisations are always 
tempting to travellers, and now and 
then they strike out vivid truths that 
the observer loses sight of after closer scrutiny. 
But nine times out of ten they hit wild. 

Some years before the war, a French jour- 
nalist produced a "thoughtful book" on the 
United States. Of course he laid great stress 
on our universal hustle for the dollar. To do 
that is to follow the line of least resistance in 
writing about America: you have only to copy 
what all the other travellers have said. 

This particular author had the French gift 
of consecutive reasoning, and had been trained 
in the school of Taine, which requires the his- 
torian to illustrate each of his general conclu- 
sions by an impressive array of specific in- 

3 



4 French Ways and Their Meaning 

stances. Therefore, when he had laid down 
the principle that every American's ruling 
passion is money-making, he cast about for an 
instance, and found a striking one. 

"So dominant," he suggested, "is this pas- 
sion, that in cultivated and intellectual Boston 
— the Athens of America — ^which possesses a 
beautiful cemetery in its peaceful parklike 
suburbs, the millionaire money-makers, un- 
willing to abandon the quarter in which their 
most active hours have been spent, have 
created for themselves a burying-ground in the 
centre of the business district, on which they 
can look down from their lofty office windows 
till they are laid there to rest in the familiar 
noise and bustle that they love." 

This literal example of the ruling passion 
strong in death seems to establish once for all 
the good old truth that the American cares 
only for money-making; and it was clever of 
the critic to find his instance in Boston instead 
of Pittsburg or Chicago. But unfortunately 
the cemetery for which the Boston millionaire 



First Impressions 



is supposed to have abandoned the green 
glades of Mount Auburn is the old prc-revo- 
lutionary grave-yard of King's Chapel, in 
v^hich no one has been buried since modern 
Boston began to exist, and about w^hich a new- 
business district has grown up as it has about 
similar carefully-guarded relics in all our ex- 
panding cities, and in many European ones as 
well. 

It is probable that not a day passes in which 
the observant American new to France does 
not reach conclusions as tempting, but as wide 
of the mark. Even in peace times it was in- 
evitable that such easy inferences should be 
drawn; and now that every branch of civilian 
life in France is more or less topsy-turvy, 
the temptation to generalise wrongly is one 
that no intelligent observer can resist. 

It is indeed unfortunate that, at the very mo- 
ment when it is most needful for France and 
America to understand each other (on small 
points, that is — we know they agree as to the 
big ones) — it is unfortunate that at this mo- 



6 French Ways and Their Meaning 

ment France should be, in so many superficial 
ways, unlike the normal peace-time France, 
and that those who are seeing her for the first 
time in the hour of her trial and her great 
glory are seeing her also in an hour of inevita- 
ble material weakness and disorganisation. 

Even four years of victorious warfare 
would dislocate the machinery of any great 
nation's life ; and four years of desperate re- 
sistance to a foe in possession of almost a tenth 
of the national territory, and that tenth in- 
dustrially the richest in the country, four such 
years represent a strain so severe that one won- 
ders to see the fields of France tilled, the mar- 
kets provided, and life in general going on as 
before. 

The fact that France is able to resist such 
a strain, and keep up such a measure of normal 
activity, is one of the many reasons for admir- 
ing her; but it must not make newcomers for- 
get that even this brave appearance of "busi- 
ness as usual" does not represent anything re- 
sembling the peace-time France, with her 



First Impressions 



magnificent faculties applied to the whole 
varied business of living, instead of being cen- 
tred on the job of holding the long line from 
the Yser to Switzerland. 

In 1913 it would have be^n almost impossi- 
ble to ask Americans to picture our situation 
if Germany had invaded the United States, 
and had held a tenth part of our most impor- 
tant territory for four years. In 19 18 such a 
suggestion seems thinkable enough, and one 
may even venture to point out that an unmili- 
tary nation like America, after four years un- 
der the invader, might perhaps present a less 
prosperous appearance than France. It is 
always a good thing to look at foreign affairs 
from the home angle; and in such a case we 
certainly should not want the allied peoples 
who might come to our aid to judge us by 
what they saw if Germany held our Atlantic 
sea-board, with all its great cities, together 
with, say, Pittsburg and Buffalo, and all our 
best manhood were in a fighting line centred 
along the Ohio River. 



8 French Ways and Their Meaning 

One of the cruellest things about a "people's 
war" is that it needs, and takes, the best men 
from every trade, even those remotest from 
fighting, because to do anything well brains 
are necessary, and a good poet and a good 
plumber may conceivably make better fighters 
than inferior representatives of arts less re- 
mote from v^ar. Therefore, to judge France 
fairly to-day, the newcomer must perpetually 
remind himself that almost all that is best in 
France is in the trenches, and not in the hotels, 
cafes and "movie-shows" he is likely to fre- 
quent. I have no fear of what the American 
will think of the Frenchman after the two 
have fraternized at the front. 

II 

One hears a good deal in these days about 
"What America can teach France;" though 
it is worth noting that the phrase recurs less 
often now than it did a year ago. 

In any case, it would seem more useful to 
leave the French to discover (as they are do- 



First Impressions 



ing every day, with the frankest appreciation) 
what they can learn from us, while we Ameri- 
cans apply ourselves to finding out what they 
have to teach us. It is obvious that any two 
intelligent races are bound to have a lot to 
learn from each other; and there could hardly 
be a better opportunity for such an exchange 
of experience than now that a great cause has 
drawn the hearts of our countries together 
while a terrible emergency has broken down 
most of the surface barriers between us. 

No doubt many American soldiers now in 
France felt this before they left home. When 
a man who leaves his job and his family at 
the first call to fight for an unknown people, 
because that people is defending the prin- 
ciple of liberty in which all the great demo- 
cratic nations believe, he likes to thin:k th?t 
the country he is fighting for comes up in ev- 
ery respect to the ideal he has formed of it. 
And perhaps some of our men were a little dis- 
appointed, and even discouraged, when they 
first came in contact with the people whose 



lo French Ways and Their Meaning 

sublime spirit they had been admiring from a 
distance for three years. Some of them may 
even, in their first moment of reaction, have 
said to themselves : "Well, after all, the Ger- 
mans we knew at home were easier people to 
get on with." 

The answer is not far to seek. For one 
thing, the critics in question knew the Ger- 
mans at home, in our home, where they had to 
talk our language or not get on, where they 
had to be what we wanted them to be — or get 
out. And, as we all know in America, no peo- 
ple on earth, when they settle in a new coun- 
try, are more eager than the Germans to adopt 
its ways, and to be taken for native-born 
citizens. 

The Germans in Germany are very dif- 
f ettnt; though, even there, they were at great 
pains, before the war, not to let Americans 
find it out. The French have never taken the 
trouble to disguise their Frenchness from for- 
eigners; but the Germans used to be very 
clever about dressing up their statues of Bis- 



First Impressions ii 

marck as ^'Liberty Enlightening the World" 
when democratic visitors were expected. An 
amusing instance of this kind of camouflage, 
which was a regular function of their govern- 
ment, came within my own experience in 1913. 
For the first time in many years I was in 
Germany that summer, and on arriving in 
Berlin I was much struck by the wonderful 
look of municipal order and prosperity which 
partly makes up for the horrors of its archi- 
tecture and sculpture. But what struck me 
still more was the extraordinary politeness of 
all the people who are often rude in other 
countries : post-office and railway officials, cus- 
toms officers, policemen, telephone-girls, and 
the other natural enemies of mankind. And I 
was the more surprised because, in former 
days, I had so often suffered from the senseless 
bullying of the old-fashioned German em- 
ploye, and because I had heard from Germans 
that state paternalism had become greatly ag- 
gravated, and that, wherever one went, petty 



12 French Ways and Their Meaning 

:■■"'' ' '^ ■ . ' ■ .. ■ . ■ ■■» , . . . ,' ',,..'B 

regulations were enforced by inexorable offi- 
cials. 

As it turned out, I found myself as free as 
air, and as obsequiously treated as royalty, and 
I might have gone home thinking that the 
German government was cruelly maligned by 
its subjects if I had not happened to go one 
evening to the Opera. 

It was in summer, but there had been a cold 
rain-storm all day, and as the Opera House 
was excessively chilly, and it was not a full- 
dress occasion, but merely an out-of-season 
performance, with everybody wearing ordi- 
nary street clothes, I decided to keep on the 
light silk cloak I was wearing. But as I 
started for my seat I felt a tap on my shoulder, 
and one of the polite officials requested me to 
take off my cloak. 

"Thank you: but I prefer to keep it on." 
"You can't; it's forbidden. Es ist ver- 
boten/' 

"Forbidden? Why, what do you mean?" 
"His Majesty the Emperor forbids any lady 



First Impressions 13 

in the audience of the Royal and Imperial 
Opera House to keep on her cloak." 

"But I've a cold, and the house is so 
chilly '' 

The polite official had grown suddenly 
stern and bullying. "Take off your. cloak," he 
ordered. 

"I won't," I said. 

We looked at each other hard for a minute 
— and I went in with my cloak on. 

When I got back to the hotel, highly indig- 
nant, I met a German Princess, a Serene 
Highness, one of the greatest ladies in Ger- 
many, a cousin of his Imperial. Majesty. 

I told her what had happened, and waited 
for an echo of my indignation. 

But none came. "Yes — I nearly always 
have an attack of neuralgia when I go to the 
Opera," she said resignedly. 

^'But do they make you take your cloak 
off?" 

"Of course. It's the Emperor's order." 

"Well — I kept mine on," I said. 



14 French Ways and Their Meaning 

Her Serene Highness looked at me incredu- 
lously. Then she thought it over and said: 
"Ah, well — ^you're an American, and Ameri- 
can travellers bring us so much money that 
the Emperor^s orders are never to bully 
them." 

What had puzzled me, by the way, when I 
looked about the crowded Opera House, was 
that the Emperor should ever order the ladies 
of Berlin to take their cloaks off at the Opera; 
but that is an affair between them and their 
dressmaker. The interesting thing was that 
the German Princess did not in the least re- 
sent being bullied herself, or having neuralgia 
in consequence — but quite recognised that it 
was .good business for her country not to bully 
Americans. 

That little incident gave me a glimpse of 
what life in Germany must be like if you are 
a German ; and also of the essential difference 
between the Germans and ourselves. 

The difference is this: The German does 
not care to be free as long as he is well fed, 



First Impressions 15 

well amused and making money. The 
Frenchman, like the American, wants to be 
free first of all, and free anyhow — free even 
when he might be better off, materially, if he 
lived under a benevolent autocracy. The 
Frenchman and the American want to have a 
voice in governing their country, and the Ger- 
man prefers to be governed by professionals, 
as long as they make him comfortable and 
give him what he wants. 

From the purely practical point of view this 
is not a bad plan, but it breaks down as soon 
as a moral issue is involved. They say cor- 
porations have no souls; neither have govern- 
ments that are not answerable to a free people 
for their actions. 

Ill 

This anecdote may have seemed to take us a 
long way from France and French ways ; but 
it will help to show that, whereas the differ- 
ences between ourselves and the French are 
mostly on the surface, and our feeling about 



1 6 French Ways and Their Meaning 

the most important things is always the same, 
the Germans, who seem less strange to many of 
us because we have been used to them at home, 
differ from us totally in all of the important 
things. 

Unfortunately surface differences — as the 
word implies — are the ones that strike the eye 
first. If beauty is only skin deep, so too are 
some of the greatest obstacles between peo- 
ples who were made to understand each other. 
French habits and manners have their roots 
in a civilisation so profoundly unlike ours — 
so much older, richer, more elaborate and 
firmly crystallised — that French customs nec- 
essarily differ from ours more than do those 
of more primitive races; and we must dig 
down to the deep faiths and principles from 
which every race draws its enduring life to 
find how like in fundamental things arc the 
two people whose destinies have been so 
widely different. 

To help the American fresh from his own 
land to overcome these initial difficulties, and 



First Impressions 17 



to arrive at a quick comprehension of French 
character, is one of the greatest services that 
Americans familiar with France can render at 
this moment. The French cannot explain 
themselves fully to foreigners, because they 
take for granted so many things that are as 
unintelligible to us as, for instance, our eating 
corned-beef hash for breakfast, or liking mus- 
tard with mutton, is to them. It takes an out- 
sider familiar with both races to explain away 
what may be called the corned-beef-hash dif- 
ferences, and bring out the underlying resem- 
blances; and while actual contact in the 
trenches will in the long run do this more 
surely than any amount of writing, it may 
nevertheless be an advantage to the newcomer 
to arrive with a few first-aid hints in his knap- 
sack. 

The most interesting and profitable way of 
studying the characteristics of a different race 
is to pick out, among them, those in which 
our own national character is most lacking. 
It is sometimes agreeable, but seldom useful. 



1 8 French Ways and Their Meaning 

to do the reverse; that is, to single out the 
weak points of the other race, and brag of our 
own advantages. This game, moreover, be- 
sides being unprofitable, is also sometimes 
dangerous. Before calling a certain trait a 
weakness, and our own opposite trait a superi- 
ority, we must be sure, as critics say, that we 
"know the context" ; we must be sure that what 
appears a defect in the character of another 
race will not prove to be a strength when 
better understood. 

Anyhow, it is safer as well as more inter- 
esting to choose the obviously admirable char- 
acteristics first, and especially those which 
happen to be more or less lacking in our own 
national make-up. 

This is what I propose to attempt in these 
articles; and I have singled out, as typically 
"French" in the best sense of that many-sided 
term, the qualities of taste, reverence, con- 
tinuity, and intellectual honesty. We are a 
new people, a pioneer people, a people des- 
tined by fate to break up ne continents and 



First Impressions 19 

■ ■■ ■ ■ 

experiment in new social conditions; and 
therefore it may be useful to see what part is 
played in the life of ? nation by some of the 
very qualities we have had the least time to 
acquire. 



7/" 




II 

REVERENCE 

I 
lAKE care! Don't eat blackberries! 
Don't you know they'll give you the 
fever?" 

Any American soldier who stops to fill his 
cap with the plump blackberries loading the 
hedgerows of France is sure to receive this 
warning from a passing peasant. 

Throughout the length and breadth of 
France, the most fruit-loving and fruit- 
cultivating of countries, the same queer con- 
viction prevails, and year after year the great 
natural crop of blackberries, nowhere better 
and more abundant, is abandoned to birds and 
insects because in some remote and perhaps 
prehistoric past an ancient Gaul once decreed 
that ^'blackberries give the feven" 

20 



Reverence 21 



An hour away, across the Channel, fresh 
blackberries and blackberry- jam form one of 
the staples of a great ally's diet; but the 
French have not yet found out that millions 
of Englishmen have eaten blackberries for 
generations without having ''the fever." 

Even if they did find it out they would 
probably say: "The English are different. 
Blackberries have always given us the fever." 
Or the more enlightened might ascribe it to 
the climate: ''The air may be different in 
England. Blackberries may not be unwhole- 
some there, but here they are poison." 

There is not the least foundation for the 
statement, and the few enterprising French 
people who have boldly risked catching "the 
fever" consume blackberries in France with as 
much enjoyment, and as little harm, as their 
English neighbours. But one could no more 
buy a blackberry in a French market than one 
could buy the fruit of the nightshade; the 
one is considered hardly less deleterious than 
the other. 



22 French Ways and Their Meaning 

The prejudice is all the queerer because the 
thrifty, food-loving French peasant has dis- 
covered the innocuousness of so many dan- 
gerous-looking funguses that frighten the 
Anglo-Saxon by their close resemblance to the 
poisonous members of the family. It takes a 
practised eye to distinguish cepes and morilles 
from the deadly toadstool ; whereas the black- 
berry resembles nothing in the world but its 
own luscious and innocent self. Yet the black- 
berry has been condemned untried because of 
some ancient taboo that the French peasant 
dares not disregard. 

Taboos of this sort are as frequent in France 
as the blackberries in the hedges, and some of 
them interfere with the deepest instincts of 
the race. 

Take, foi instance, the question of dinner- 
giving. Dining is a solemn rite to the French, 
because it offers the double opportunity of 
good eating and good talk, the two forms of 
aesthetic enjoyment most generally appre- 
ciated. Everything connected with dinner- 



Reverence 23 



giving has an almost sacramental importance 
in France. The quality of the cooking comes 
first; but, once this is assured, the hostess' chief 
concern is that the quality of the talk shall 
match it. To attain this, the guests are as care- 
fully chosen as boxers for a championship, 
their number is strictly limited, and care is 
taken not to invite two champions likely to 
talk each other down. 

The French, being unable to live without 
good talk, are respectful of all the small ob- 
servances that facilitate it. Interruption is 
considered the height of discourtesy; but so is 
any attempt, even on the part of the best talk- 
ers, to hold the floor and prevent others from 
making themselves heard. Share and share 
alike is the first rule of conversational polite- 
ness, and if a talker is allowed to absorb the 
general attention for more than a few minutes 
it is because his conversation is known to be 
so good that the other guests have been invited 
to listen to him. Even so, he must give them 
a chance now and then, and it is they who 



24 French Ways and Their Meaning 

»i — « 

must abstain from taking it, and must re- 
peatedly let him see that for once they are 
content to act as audience. Moreover, even 
the privileged talker is not allowed to dwell 
long on any one topic, however stimulating. 
The old lady who said to her granddaughter: 
*'My dear, you will soon learn that an hour is 
enough of anything" would have had to re- 
duce her time-limit to five minutes if she had 
been formulating the rules of French conver- 
sation. 

In circles where interesting and entertain- 
ing men are habitually present the women are 
not expected to talk much. They are not, of 
course, to sit stupidly silent; responsiveness 
is their role, and they must know how to guide 
the conversation by putting the right question 
or making the right comment. But above all 
they are not to air their views in the presence 
of men worth listening to. The French care 
passionately for ideas, but they do not expect 
women to have them, and since they never 
mistake erudition for intelligence (as we un- 



Reverence 2^ 



educated Anglo-Saxons sometimes do) no 
woman can force her way into the talk by 
mere weight of book-learning. She has no 
place there unless her ideas, and her way of 
expressing them, put her on an equality with 
the men; and this seldom happens. Women 
(if they only knew it!) are generally far more 
intelligent listeners than talkers ; and the rare 
quality of the Frenchwoman's listening con- 
tributes not a little to the flashing play of 
French talk. 

Here, then, is an almost religious ritual, 
planned with the sole purpose of getting the 
best talk from the best talkers; but there are 
two malicious little taboos that delight in up- 
setting all these preparations. 

One of them seems incredibly childish. It 
is a rule of French society that host and 
hostess shall sit exactly opposite each other. 
If the number at table is uneven, then, instead 
of the guests being equally spaced, they will 
be packed like sardines about one half the 



26 French Ways and Their Meaning 

board, and left on the other with echoing 
straits between them thrown. 

If the number is such that, normally seated, 
with men and women alternating, a lady 
should find herself opposite the hostess, that 
unthinkable sacrilege must also be avoided, 
and three women be placed together on one 
side of the table, and three men on the other. 
This means death to general conversation, for 
intelligent women will never talk together 
when they can talk to men, or even listen to 
them; so that the party, thus disarranged, re- 
sembles that depressing dish, a pudding in 
which all the plums have run into one corner. 

The plums do not like it either. The scat- 
tered affinities grope for each other and vainly 
seek to reconstitute a normal pudding. The 
attempt is always a failure, and the French 
hostess knows it; yet many delightful dinners 
are wrecked on the unrelenting taboo that 
obliges host and hostess to sit exactly opposite 
each other. 

"Precedence" is another obstacle to the real- 



Reverence 27 



isation of the perfect dinner. Precedence in 
a republic — ! It is acknowledged to be an 
absurd anomaly except where official rank is 
concerned; and though its defenders argue 
that it is a short-cut through many problems 
of vanity and amour-propre it might certainly 
be disregarded to the general advantage when- 
ever a few intelligent people have been 
brought together, not to compare their titles 
but to forget them. 

But there it is. The French believe them- 
selves to be the most democratic people in the 
world — and they have some of the democratic 
instincts, though not as many as they think. 
But an Academician must sit on his hostess' 
right, unless there is a Duke or an Ambassa- 
dor or a Bishop present; and these rules, 
comic enough where peer meets prelate, be- 
come more humorous (and also grow more 
strict) when applied to the imperceptible dif- 
ferences between the lower degrees of the im- 
mense professional and governmental hier- 
archy. 



28 French Ways and Their Meaning 

But again — there it is. A hostess whose 
papa helped to blow up the Tuileries or pull 
down the Vendome column weighs the rela- 
tive clairns of two Academicians (always a 
bad stumbling block) as carefully as a duchess 
of the old regime, brought up to believe in the 
divine right of Kings, scrutinises the gene- 
alogy of her guests before seating them. And 
this strict observance of rules is not due to 
snobbishness; the French are not a snobbish 
people. It is part of les bienseances, of the 
always-have-beens ; and there is a big bullying 
taboo in the way of changing it. 

In England, where precedence has, at any 
rate, the support of a court, where it is, so to 
speak, still a "going concern," and works au- 
tomatically, the hostess, if she is a woman of 
the world, casts it to the winds on informal oc- 
casions ; but in France there is no democratic 
dinner-table over which it does not perma- 
nently hang its pall. 



Reverence 29 



II 

It may seem curious to have chosen the in- 
stance of the blackberry as the text of a homily 
on ''Reverence." Why not have substituted as 
a title ''Prejudice" — or simply "Stupidity"? 

Well — "Prejudice" and "Reverence," of- 
tener than one thinks, are overlapping terms, 
and it seems fairer to choose the one of the two 
that is not what the French call "pejorative." 
As for "Stupidity" — it must be remembered 
that the French peasant thinks it incredibly 
stupid of us not instantly to distinguish a 
mushroom from a toadstool, or any of the in- 
termediate forms of edible funguses from 
their death-dealing cousins! Remember that 
we Americans deprive ourselves of many de- 
licious dishes, and occasionally hurry whole 
harmless families to the grave, through not 
taking the trouble to examine and compare 
the small number of mushrooms at our dis- 
posal; while the French avoid blackberries 
from a deep and awesome conviction handed 
down from the night of history. 



30 French Ways and Their Meaning 

There is the key to my apologue. The 
French fear of the blackberry is not due to 
any lack of curiosity about its qualities, but to 
respect for some ancient sanction which pre- 
vents those qualities from being investigated. 

There is a reflex of negation, of rejection, 
at the very root of the French character: an 
instinctive recoil from the new, the untasted, 
the untested, like the retracting of an insect's 
feelers at contact with an unfamiliar object; 
and no one can hope to understand the French 
without bearing in mind that this unquestion- 
ing respect for rules of which the meaning is 
forgotten acts as a perpetual necessary check 
to the idol-breaking instinct of the freest 
minds in the world. 

It may sound like a poor paradox to say 
that the French are traditional about small 
things because they are so free about big ones. 
But the history of human societies seems to 
show that if they are to endure they must 
unconsciously secrete the corrective of their 
own highest qualities. 



Reverence 3 1 



"Reverence" may be the wasteful fear of an 
old taboo; but it is also the sense of the pre- 
ciousness of long accumulations of experience. 
The quintessential is precious because what- 
ever survives the close filtering of time is 
likely to answer to some deep racial need, 
moral or aesthetic. It is stupid to deprive 
one's self of blackberries for a reason one has 
forgotten ; but what should we say of a people 
who had torn down their cathedrals when 
they ceased to feel the beauty of Gothic archi- 
tecture, as the French had ceased to feel it in 
the seventeenth century? 

The instinct to preserve that which has been 
slow and difficult in the making, that into 
which the long associations of the past are 
woven, is a more constant element of pro- 
gress than the Huguenot's idol-breaking 
hammer. 

Reverence and irreverence are both needed 
to help the world along, and each is most 
needed where the other most naturally 
abounds. 



32 French Ways and Their Meaning 

In this respect France and America are in 
the same case. America, because of her ori- 
gin, tends to irreverence, impatience, to all 
sorts of rash and contemptuous short-cuts; 
France, for the same reason, to routine, prece- 
dent, tradition, the beaten path. Therefore it 
ought to help each nation to apply to herself 
the corrective of the other's example; and 
America can profit more by seeking to find out 
why France is reverent, and what she reveres, 
than by trying to inoculate her with a flippant 
disregard of her own past. 

The first thing to do is to try to find out 
why a people, so free and active of thought as 
the French, are so subject to traditions that 
have lost their meaning. 

The fundamental cause is probably geo- 
graphical. We Americans have hitherto been 
geographically self-contained, and until this 
war did away with distances we were free to 
try any social and political experiments we 
pleased, without, at any rate, weakening our- 
selves in relation to our neighbours. To keep 



Reverence 33 



them off we did not even have to have an 
army! 

France, on the contrary, has had to fight 
for her existence ever since she has had any. 
Of her, more than of any other great modern 
nation, it may be said that from the start she 
has had, as Goethe puts it, to ^'reconquer each 
day the liberty w^on the day before." 

Again and again, in the past, she has seen 
her territory invaded, her monuments de- 
stroyed, her institutions shattered; the ground 
on which the future of the world is now being 
fought for is literally the same as that Cata- 
launian plain (the ^'Camp de Chalons") on 
which Attila tried to strangle France over 
fourteen hundred years ago. ^^In the year 
450 all Gaul was filled with terror; for the 
dreaded Attila, with a host of strange figures, 
Huns, Tartars, Teutons, head of an empire 
of true barbarians, drew near her borders. 
Barbarism . . . now threatened the world. 
It had levied a shameful tribute on Constanti- 
nople; it now threatened the farthest West. 



34 French Ways and Their Meaning 

If Gaul fell, Spain would fall, and Italy, 
and Rome; and Attila would reign supreme, 
with an empire of desolation, over the whole 
world."* 

^^The whole world" is a bigger place now- 
adays, and "farthest West" is at the Golden 
Gate and not at the Pillars of Hercules; but 
otherwise might we not be reading a leader in 
yesterday's paper? 

Try to picture life under such continual 
menace of death, and see how in an indus- 
trious, intelligent and beauty-loving race it 
must inevitably produce two strong passions: 

Pious love of every yard of the soil and 
every stone of the houses. 

Intense dread lest any internal innovations 
should weaken the social structure and open a 
door to the enemy. 

There is nothing like a Revolution for mak- 
ing people conservative ; that is one of the rea- 
sons why, for instance, our Constitution, the 
child of Revolution, is the most conservative 

* Kitchin : "History of France," vol. I. 



Reverence 35 



in history. But, in other respects, why should 
we Americans be conservative? To begin 
with, there is not much as yet for us to '^con- 
serve" except a few root-principles of con- 
duct, social and political; and see how they 
spring up and dominate every other interest 
in each national crisis! 

In France it is different. The French have 
nearly two thousand years of history and art 
and industry and social and political life to 
"conserve" ; that is another of the reasons why 
their intense intellectual curiosity, their per- 
petual desire for the new thing, is counteracted 
by a clinging to rules and precedents that have 
often become meaningless, 

III 

Reverence is the life-belt of those whose 
home is on a raft, and Americans have not 
pored over the map of France for the last four 
years without discovering that she may fairly 
be called a raft. But geographical necessity is 
far from being the only justification of rever- 



36 French Ways and Their Meaning 

ence. It is not chiefly because the new meth- 
ods of warfare lay America open to the same 
menace as continental Europe that it is good 
for us to consider the meaning of this ancient 
principle of civilised societies. 

We are growing up at last; and it is only 
in maturity that a man glances back along 
the past, and sees the use of the constraints 
that irritated his impatient youth. So with 
races and nations; and America has reached 
the very moment in her development when she 
may best understand what has kept older races 
and riper civilisations sound. 

Reverence is one of these preserving ele- 
ments, and it is worth while to study it in its 
action in French life. If geographical neces- 
sity is the fundamental cause, another, almost 
as deep-seated, is to be found in the instinct 
of every people to value and preserve what 
they have themselves created and made beau- 
tiful. 

In Selden's ^Table-talk" there is told the 
story of a certain carver of idols. Being a 



Reverence 37 



pious man he had always worshipped his own 
idols till he was suddenly called upon to make 
one in great haste, and, no other wood being 
available, had to cut down the plum-tree in 
his own garden and make the image out of 
that. 

He could not worship the plum-tree idol, 
because he knew too much about the plum- 
tree. That, at least, is Selden's version; but 
how little insight it shows into human pro- 
cesses! Of course, after a time, the carver 
came to worship the plum-tree idol, and to 
worship it just because he had grown the 
tree and carved the image, and it was there- 
fore doubly of his making. That is the very 
key to the secret of reverence; the tenderness 
we feel for our own effort extending to re- 
spect for all fine human effort. 

America is already showing this instinct 
in her eagerness to beautify her towns, and to 
preserve her few pre-Revolutionary buildings 
— that small fragment of her mighty Euro- 
pean heritage. 



38 French Ways and Their Meaning 

f ■ ■ ' ■ ■ ""^ 

But there are whole stretches of this heri- 
tage that have been too long allowed to run to 
waste: our language, our literature, and many 
other things pertaining to the great undefin- 
able domain of Taste. 

A man who owns a vast field does not care 
for that field half as much when it is a waste 
as after he has sweated over its furrows and 
seen the seeds spring. And when he has 
turned a bit of it into a useless bright flower- 
garden he cares for that useless bit best of all. 

The deeper civilisation of a country may 
to a great extent be measured by the care she 
gives to her flower-garden — the corner of her 
life- where the supposedly ^^useless" arts and 
graces flourish. In the cultivating of that 
garden France has surpassed all modern na- 
tions; and one of the greatest of America's 
present opportunities is to find out why. 



III 

TASTE 



FRENCH taste? Why, of course— ev- 
erybody knows all about that! It's 
the way the women put on their hats, 
and the upholsterers drape their curtains. 

Certainly — why not? 

The artistic integrity of the French has led 
them to feel from the beginning that there is 
no difference in kind between the curve of a 
woman's hat-brim and the curve of a Rodin 
marble, or between the droop of an uphol- 
sterer's curtain and that of the branches along 
a great avenue laid out by Le Notre. 

It was the Puritan races — every one of them 
non-creative in the plastic arts — who decided 
that ''Art" (that is, plastic art) was some- 
thing apart from life, as dangerous to it as 

39 



40 French Ways and Their Meaning 

Plato thought Poets in a Republic, and to be 
tolerated only when it was so lofty, unap- 
proachable and remote from any appeal to 
average humanity that it bored people to 
death, and they locked it up in Museums to 
get rid of it. 

But this article is headed ^^Taste," and taste, 
whatever it may be, is not, after all, the same 
thing as art. No; it is not art — but it is the 
atmosphere in which art lives, and outside of 
which it cannot live. It is the regulating prin- 
ciple of all art, of the art of dress and of 
manners, and of living in general, as well as 
of sculpture or music. It is because the 
French have always been so innately sure of 
this, that, without burdening themselves with 
formulas, they have instinctively applied to 
living the same rules that they applied to ar- 
tistic creation. 

II 

I remember being told when I was a young 
girl: ^'If you want to interest the person you 



Taste 41 

are talking to, pitch your voice so that only 
that one person will hear you." 

That small axiom, apart from its obvious 
application, contains nearly all there is to say 
about Taste. 

That a thing should be in scale — should be 
proportioned to its purpose — is one of the 
first requirements of beaut)', in whatever or- 
der. No shouting where an undertone will 
do ; and no gigantic Statue of Liberty in but- 
ter for a World's Fair, when the little Wing- 
less Victory, tying on her sandal on the Acrop- 
olis, holds the whole horizon in the curve of 
her slim arm. 

The essence of taste is suitability. Divest 
the woid of its prim and priggish implica- 
tions, and see how it expresses the mysterious 
demand of eye and mind for symmetry, har- 
mony and order. 

Suitability — fitness — is, and always has 
been, the very foundation of French stand- 
ards. Fitness is only a contraction of fitting- 
ness; and if any of our American soldiers in 



42 French Ways and Their Meaning 

France should pause to look up at the narrow 
niches in the portal of a French cathedral, or 
at the group of holy figures in the triangle or 
half-circle above, they are likely to be struck 
first of all by the way in which the attitude 
of each figure or group is adapted to the space 
it fills. 

If the figure is cramped and uncomfortable 
— if the saint or angel seems to be in a strait- 
jacket or a padded cell — then the sculptor 
has failed, and taste is offended. It is essen- 
tial that there should be perfect harmony be- 
tween the natural attitude of the figure and 
the space it lives in — that a square saint should 
not be put in a round hole. Range through 
plastic art, from Chaldaea to France, and you 
will see how this principle of adaptation has 
always ruled composition. 

Ill 

It is the sense of its universal applicability 
that makes taste so living an influence in 
France. French people ^'have taste" as nat- 



Taste 4-^ 

urally as they breathe: it is not regarded as 
an accomplishment, like playing the flute. 

The universal existence of taste, and of the 
standard it creates— it insists on — explains 
many of the things that strike Americans on 
first arriving in France. 

It is the reason, for instance, wh}' the 
French have beautiful stone quays along the 
great rivers on which their cities are built, 
and why noble monuments of architecture, 
and gardens and terraces, have been built 
along these quays. The French have always 
felt and reverenced the beauty of their rivers, 
and known the value, artistic and hygienic, of 
a beautiful and well-kept river-front in the 
heart of a crowded city. 

When industrialism began its work of dis- 
figurement in the great cities of the world, 
long reaches of the Thames were seized upon 
by the factory-builder, and London has only 
by a recent effort saved a short stretch of her 
river front; even so, from the Embankment, 



44 French Ways and Their Meaning 

whether at Westminster or Chelsea, one looks 
across at ugliness, untidiness and squalor. 

When industrialism came to the wise old 
Latin cities — Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, Flor- 
ence — their river banks were already firmly 
and beautifully built up, and the factory 
chimneys had to find a footing in the outskirts. 
Any American with eyes to see, who compares 
the architectural use to which Paris has put 
the Seine with the wasteful degradation of 
the unrivalled twin river-fronts of New York, 
may draw his own conclusions as to the sheer 
material advantage of taste in the creation of 
a great city. 

Perhaps the most curious instance of taste- 
blindness in dealing with such an opportunity 
is to be found in Boston, where Beacon Street 
calmly turned its wealthy back to the bay, 
and fringed with clothes-lines the shores that 
might have made of Boston one of the most 
beautifully situated cities in the world. In 
this case, industry did not encroach or slums 
degrade. The Boston aristocracy appro- 



Taste 4:; 

priated the shore of the bay for its own resi- 
dential uses, but apparently failed to notice 
that the bay was there. 

Taste, also — the recognition of a standard 
— explains the existence of such really na- 
tional institutions as the French Academy, and 
the French national theatre, the Theatre Fran- 
gais. The history of the former, in particular, 
throws a light on much that is most distinc- 
tively French in the French character. 

It would be difficult for any one walking 
along the Quai Malaquais, and not totally 
blind to architectural beauty, not to be 
charmed by the harmony of proportion and 
beauty of composition of a certain building 
with curved wings and a small central dome 
that looks across the Seine at the gardens of 
the Louvre and the spires of Saint Germain 
I'Auxerrois. 

That building, all elegance, measure and 
balance, from its graceful cupola to the stately 
stone vases surmounting the lateral colonnades 
«~that building is the old ''College des Quatre 



46 French Ways and Their Meaning 

Nations," the Institute of France, and the 
home of the French Academy. 

In 1635, at a time when France was still 
struggling with the heavy inheritance of feu* 
dalism, a bad man and great statesman, the 
mighty Cardinal Richelieu, paused in his long 
fight with the rebellious vassals of the crown 
to create a standard of French speech: "To 
establish the rules of the language, and make 
French not only elegant, but capable of deal- 
ing with the arts and sciences." 

Think of the significance of such an act at 
such a moment! France was a welter of polit- 
ical and religious dissension; everything in 
the monarchy, and the monarchy itself, was in 
a state of instability. Austria and Spain 
menaced it from without, the great vassals 
tore it asunder from within. During the 
Great Assizes of Auvergne some of the most 
powerful of these nobles were tried, punished 
and stripped of their monstrous privileges; 
and the record of their misdeeds reads like a 



Taste 47 

tale of Sicilian brigandage and Corsican ven- 
detta. 

Gradually the iron hand of Richelieu drew 
order — a grim pitiless order — out of this unin- 
habitable chaos. But it was in the very thick 
of the conflict that he seemed to feel the need 
of creating, then and there, some fixed princi- 
ple of civilised life, some kind of ark in which 
thought and taste and ''civility'^ could take 
shelter. It was as if, in the general upheaval, 
he wished to give stability to the things which 
humanise and unite society. And he chose 
"taste" — taste in speech, in culture, in man- 
ners, — as the fusing principle of his new 
-Academy. 

The traditional point of view of its founder 
has been faithfully observed for nearly three 
hundred years by the so-called "Forty Im- 
mortals," the Academicians who throne under 
the famous cupola. The Academy has never 
shrunk into a mere retreat for lettered pedan- 
try: as M. Saillens says in his admirable little 
book, "Facts about France": "The great ob- 



48 French Ways and Their Meaning 

ject of Richelieu was national unity," and 
^'The Forty do not believe that they can keep 
the language under discipline bymerely pub- 
lishing a Dictionary now and then (the first 
edition came out in 1694). They believe that 
a standard must be set, and that it is for them 
to set it. Therefore the Academy does not 
simply call to its ranks famous or careful 
writers, but soldiers as well, bishops, scien- 
tists, men of the world, men of social rank, so 
as to maintain from generation to generation a 
national conservatory of good manners and 
good speech." 

For this reason, though Frenchmen have 
always laughed at their Academy, they have 
always respected it, and aspired to the distinc- 
tion of membership. Even the rebellious 
spirits who satirise it in their youth usually 
become, in maturity, almost too eager for its 
recognition; and, though the fact of being an 
Academician gives social importance, it 
would be absurd to pretend that such men as 
Pasteur, Henri Poincare, Marshal Joffre, 



Taste 49 

sought the distinction for that reason, or that 
France would have thought it worthy of their 
seeking if the institution had not preserved 
its original significance. 

That significance was simply the safe- 
guarding of what the French call les c hoses 
de Vesprit; which cannot quite be translated 
"things of the spirit," and yet means more 
nearly that than anything else. And Riche- 
lieu and the original members of the Acad- 
emy had recognised from the first day that 
language was the chosen vessel in which the 
finer life of a nation must be preserved. 

It is not uncommon nowadays, especially in 
America, to sneer at any deliberate attempts 
to stabilise language. To test such criticisms it 
is' useful to reduce them to their last conse- 
quence — which is alm^ost always absurdity. It 
is not difficult to discover what becomes of a 
language left to itself, without accepted 
Standards or restrictions; instances may be 
found among any savage tribes without fixed 
standards of speech. Their language speedily 



50 French Ways and Their Meaning 

ceases to be one, and deteriorates into a mud- 
dle of unstable dialects. Or, if an instance 
nearer home is needed, the lover of English 
need only note what that rich language has 
shrunk to on the lips, and in the literature, of 
the heterogeneous hundred millions of Ameri- 
can citizens who, without uniformity of tra- 
dition or recognised guidance, are being suf- 
fered to work their many wills upon it. 

But at this point it may be objected that, 
after all, England herself has never had an 
Academy, nor could ever conceivably have 
had one, and that whatever the English of 
America has become, the English of England 
is still the language of her great tradition, 
with perfectly defined standards of taste and 
propriety. 

England is England, as France is France: 
the one feels the need of defining what the 
other finds it simpler to take for granted. 
England has never had a written Constitu- 
tion; yet her constitutional government has 
long been the model of free nations. Eng- 



Taste 51 

land's standards are all implicit. She does 
not feel the French need of formulating and 
tabulating. Her Academy is not built with 
hands, but it is just as powerful, and just as 
visible to those who have eyes to see; and 
the name of the English Academy is Usage. 

IV 

I said just now: "If any of our American 
soldiers look up at the niches in the portal 
of a French cathedral they are likely to be 
struck first of all by" such and such things. 

In our new Army all the arts and profes- 
sions are represented, and if the soldier in 
question happens to be a sculptor, an archi- 
tect, or an art critic, he will certainly note 
what I have pointed out; but if he is not a 
trained observer, the chances are that he will 
not even look up. 

The difference is that in France almost ev- 
ery one has the seeing eye, just as almost every 
one has the hearing ear. It is not a platitude, 
though it may be a truism, to say that the 



52 French Ways and Their Meaning 

French are a race of artists: it is the key that 
unlocks every door of their complex pyschol- 
ogy, and consequently the key that must be 
oftenest in the explorer's hand. 

The gift of the seeing eye is, obviously, a 
first requisite where taste is to prevail. And 
the question is, how is the seeing eye to be ob- 
tained? What is the operation for taste- 
blindness? Or is there any; and are not some 
races — the artistically non-creative — born as 
irremediably blind as Kentucky cave-fishes? 

The answer might be yes, in the case of 
the wholly non-creative races. But the men 
of English blood are creative artists tooj 
theirs is the incomparable gift of poetic ex- 
pression. And any race gifted with one form 
of artistic originality is always acutely appre- 
ciative of other cognate forms of expression. 
There has never been a race more capable 
than the English of appreciating the great 
plastic creators, Greece, Italy and France. 
This gift of the critical sense in those art« 
wherein the race does not excel in original ex- 



Taste 



53 



pression seems an inevitable by-product of its 
own special endowment. In such races taste- 
blindness is purely accidental, and the opera- 
tion that cures it is the long slow old-fash- 
ioned one of education. There is no other. 

The artist races are naturally less dependent 
on education: to a certain degree their in- 
stinct takes the place of acquired discrimina- 
tion. But they set a greater store on it than 
any other races because they appreciate more 
than the others all that, even to themselves, 
education reveals and develops. 

It is just because the French are naturally 
endowed with taste that they attach such im- 
portance to cultivation, and that French stand- 
ards of education are so infinitely higher and 
more severe than those existing in Anglo- 
Saxon countries. We are too much inclined 
to think that we have disposed of the matter 
when we say that, in our conception of life, 
education should be formative and not in- 
structive. The point is, the French might re- 
turn, what are we to be formed for? And, in 



54 French Ways and Their Meaning 

any case, they would not recognise the an- 
tithesis, since they believe that, to form, one 
must instruct: instruct the eye, the ear, the 
brain, every one of those marvellous organs of 
sense so often left dormant by our Anglo- 
Saxon training. 

It used to be thought that if savages ap- 
peared unimpressed by the wonders of occi- 
dental art or industry it was because their 
natural hauteur would not let them betray 
surprise to the intruder. That romantic illu- 
sion has been dispelled by modern investiga- 
tion, and the traveller now knows that the sav- 
age is unimpressed because he does not see the 
new things presented to him. It takes the 
most complex assemblage of associations, 
visual and mental, to enable us to discover 
what a picture represents: the savage placed 
before such familiar examples of the graphic 
art as 'The Infant Samuel" or ''His Master's 
Voice" would not see the infant or the fox- 
terrier, much less guess what they were sup- 
posed to be doing. 



Taste 



^^ 



As long as America believes in short-cuts 
to knowledge, in any possibility of buying 
taste in tabloids, she will never come into her 
real inheritance of English culture. A gen- 
tleman travelling in the Middle West met a 
charming girl who was a "college graduate." 
He asked her what line of study she had se- 
lected, and she replied that she had learnt 
music one year, and languages the next, and 
that last year she had "learnt art." 

It is the pernicious habit of regarding the 
arts as something that can be bottled, pickled 
and absorbed in twelve months (thanks to 
"courses," summaries and abridgments) that 
prevents the development of a real artistic sen- 
sibility in our eager and richly endowed race. 
Patience, deliberateness, reverence: these are 
the fundamental elements of taste. The 
French have always cultivated them, and it is 
as much to them as to the eagle-flights of 
genius that France owes her long artistic su- 
premacy. 

From the Middle Ages to the Revolution 



^6 French Ways and Their Meaning 

all the French trade-guilds had their travel- 
ling members, the "Compagnons du Tour de 
France." Not for greed of gold, but simply 
from the ambition to excel in their own craft, 
these "companions," their trade once learned, 
took their staves in hand, and v^andered on 
foot over France, going from one to another 
of the cities v^here the best teachers of their 
special trades were to be found, and serving 
an apprenticeship in each till they learned 
enough to surpass their masters. The "tour 
de France" was France's old way of acquiring 
"EfBciency"; and even now she does not be- 
lieve it can be found in newspaper nostrums. 




IV 

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY 

I 

OST people, in their infancy, have 
made bogeys out of sofa-pillows 
and overcoats, and the imaginative 
child always comes to believe in the reality 
of the bogey he has manufactured, and to- 
ward twilight grows actually afraid of it. 

When I was a little girl the name of Horace 
Greeley was potent in American politics, and 
some irreverent tradesman had manufactured 
a pink cardboard fan (on the ^'palmetto" mod- 
el) which represented the countenance of 
the venerable demagogue, and was sur- 
rounded with a white silk fringe in imitation 
of his hoary hair and ''chin-beard." A 
Horace Greeley fan had long been knocking 
about our country-house, and was a familiar 
object to me and to my little cousins, when 

57 



58 French Ways and Their Meaning 

one day it occurred to us to make a bogey 
with my father's overcoat, put Mr. Greeley's 
head on top, and seat him on the verandah 
near the front door. 

When we were tired of playing we started 
to go in; but there on the threshold in the 
dusk sat Mr. Greeley, suddenly transformed 
into an animate and unknown creature, and 
dumb terror rooted us to the spot. Not one 
of us had the courage to demolish that super- 
natural and malevolent old man, or to dash 
past him into the house — and oh, the relief it 
was when a big brother came along and re- 
duced him into his constituent parts! 

Such inhibitions take the imagination far 
back to the childhood of the human race, 
when terrors and taboos lurked in every bush ; 
and wherever the fear of the thing it has 
created survives in the mind of any society, 
that society is still in its childhood. Intellec- 
tual honesty, the courage to look at things as 
they are, is the first test of mental maturity. 
Till a society ceases to be afraid of the truth in 



Intellectual Honesty 159 

the domain of ideas it is in leading-strings, 
morally and mentally. 

The singular superiority of the French has 
always lain in their intellectual courage. 
Other races and nations have been equally dis- 
tinguished for moral courage, but too often it 
has been placed at the service of ideas they 
were afraid to analyse. The French always 
want to find out first just what the concep- 
tions they are fighting for are worth. They 
will not be downed by their own bogeys, much 
less by anybody else's. The young Oedipus 
of Ingres, calmly questioning the Sphinx, is 
the very symbol of the French intelligence; 
and it is because of her dauntless curiosity that 
France is of all countries the most grown up. 

To persons unfamiliar with the real French 
character, this dauntless curiosity is supposed 
to apply itself chiefly to spying out and dis- 
cussing acts and emotions which the Anglo- 
Saxon veils from publicity. The French view 
of what are euphemistically called "the facts 
of life" (as the Greeks called the Furies the 



6o French Ways and Their Meaning 

''Amiable Ones") is often spoken of as though 
it were inconsistent with those necessary ele- 
ments of any ordered society that we call 
purity and morality. Because the French talk 
and write freely about subjects and situations 
that Anglo-Saxons, for the last hundred years 
(not before), have agreed not to mention, it is 
assumed that the French gloat over such sub- 
jects and situations. As a matter of fact, they 
simply take them for granted, as part of the 
great parti-coloured business of life, and no 
more gloat over them (in the morbid intro- 
spective sense) than they do over their morn- 
ing coffee. 

To be sure, they do ''gloat" over their cof- 
fee in a sense unknown to consumers of liquid 
chicory and health-beverages: they "gloat," 
in fact, over everything that tastes good, looks 
beautiful, or appeals to any one of their acute 
and highly-trained five senses. But they do 
this with no sense of greediness or shame or 
immodesty, and consequently without morbid- 
ness or waste of time. They take the normal 



Intellectual Honesty 6i 



pleasures, physical and aesthetic, ^4n their 
stride," so to speak, as wholesome, nourishing, 
and necessary for the background of a labori- 
ous life of business or study, and not as sub- 
jects for nasty prying or morbid self-examina- 
tion. 

It is necessary for any one who would judge 
France fairly to get this fundamental differ- 
ence fixed in his mind before forming an opin- 
ion of the illustrated '^funny papers," of the 
fiction, the theatres, the whole trend of French 
humour, irony and sentiment. Well-meaning 
people waste much time in seeking to prove 
that Gallic and Anglo-Saxon minds take the 
same view of such matters, and that the Vie 
Parisienne, the ^'little theatres" and the light 
fiction of France do not represent the average 
French temperament, but are a vile attempt 
(by foreign agents) to cater to foreign por- 
nography. 

The French have always been a gay and 
free and Rabelaisian people. They attach a 
great deal of importance to love-making, but 



62 French Ways and Their Meaning 

they consider it more simply and less solemnly 
than we. They are cool, resourceful and 
merry, crack jokes about the relations between 
-the sexes, and are used to the frank discussion 
of what some one tactfully called "the opera- 
tions of Nature." They are puzzled by our 
queer fear of our own bodies, and accustomed 
to relate openly and unapologetically the 
anecdotes that Anglo-Saxons snicker over pri- 
vately and with apologies. They define por- 
nography as a taste for the nasty, and not as 
an interest in the natural. But nothing would 
be more mistaken than to take this as proving 
that family feeling is less deep and tender in 
France than elsewhere, or the conception of 
the social virtues different. It means merely 
that the French are not frightened by the 
names of things ; that they dislike what we call 
coarseness much less than what they call 
pruriency; and that they have too great a faith 
in the fundamental life-forces, and too much 
tenderness for the young mother suckling her 
baby, for Daphnis and Chloe in the orchard 



Intellectual Honesty 63 

at dawn, and Philemon and Baucis on their 
threshold at sunset, not to wonder at our being 
ashamed of any of the processes of nature. 

It is convenient to put the relations between 
the sexes first on the list of subjects about 
which the French and Anglo-Saxon races 
think and behave differently, because it is the 
difference which strikes the superficial ob- 
server first, and which has been most used in 
the attempt to prove the superior purity of 
Anglo-Saxon morals. But French outspoken- 
ness would not be interesting if it applied only 
to sex-questions, for savages are outspoken 
about those, too. The French attitude in that 
respect is interesting only as typical of the gen- 
eral intellectual fearlessness of France. She 
is not afraid of anything that concerns man- 
kind, neither of pleasure and mirth nor of 
exultations and agonies. 

The French are intrinsically a tough race: 
they are careless of pain, unafraid of risks, 
contemptuous of precautions. They have no 
idea that life can be evaded, and if it could be 



64 French Ways and Their Meaning 

they would not try to evade it. They regard 
it as a gift so magnificent that they are ready 
to take the bad weather with the fine rather 
than miss a day of the golden year. 

It is this innate intellectual honesty, the spe- 
cific distinction of the race, which has made it 
the torch-bearer of the world. Bishop But- 
ler's celebrated: ''Things are as they are and 
will be as they will be" might have been the 
motto of the French intellect. It is an axiom 
that makes dull minds droop, but exalts the 
brain imaginative enough to be amazed before 
the marvel of things as they are. 

II 

Mr. Howells, I feel sure, will forgive me 
if I quote here a comment I once heard him 
make on theatrical taste in America. We had 
been talking of that strange exigency of the 
American public which compels the dramatist 
(if he wishes to be played) to wind up his 
play, whatever its point of departure, with the 
"happy-ever-after" of the fairy-tales; and I 



INTELLFXTUAL HONESTY 6<; 

had remarked that this did not imply a prefer- 
ence for comedy, but that, on the contrary, our 
audiences want to be harrowed (and even 
slightly shocked) from eight till ten-thirty, 
and then consoled and reassured before eleven. 

^Tes," said Mr. Howells; 'Svhat the Amer- 
ican public wants is a tragedy with a happy 
ending,^' 

What Mr. Howells said of the American 
theatre is true of the whole American attitude 
toward life. 

"A tragedy with a happy ending" is exactly 
what the child wants before he goes to sleep : 
the reassurance that ''all's well with the 
world" as he lies in his cosy nursery. It is a 
good thing that the child should receive this 
reassurance; but as long as he needs it he re- 
mains a child, and the world he lives in is a 
nursery-world. Things are not always and 
everywhere well with the world, and each man 
has to find it out as he grows up. It is the 
finding out that makes him grow, and until he 



66 French Ways and Their Meaning 

has faced the fact and digested the lesson he is" 
not grown up — he is still in the nursery. 

The same thing is true of countries and peo- 
ples. The "sheltered life," whether of the 
individual or of the nation, must either have 
a violent and tragic awakening — or never 
wake up at all. The keen French intelligence 
perceived this centuries ago, and has always 
preferred to be awake and alive, at whatever 
cost. The cost has been heavy, but the results 
have been worth it, for France leads the world 
intellectually just because she is the most 
grown up of the nations. 

In each of the great nations there is a small 
minority which is at about the same level of 
intellectual culture ; but it is not between these 
minorities (though even here the level is per- 
haps higher in France) that comparisons may 
profitably be made. A cross-section of aver- 
age life must be taken, and compared with the 
same average in a country like ours, to under- 
stand why France leads in the world of ideas. 

The theatre has an importance in France 



Intellectual Honesty 67 



which was matched only in the most glorious 
days of Greece. The dramatic sense of the 
French, their faculty of perceiving and enjoy- 
ing the vivid contrasts and ironies of daily 
life, and their ability to express emotion where 
Anglo-Saxons can only choke with it, this in- 
nate dramatic gift, which is a part of their 
general artistic endowment, leads them to at- 
tach an importance to the theatre incompre- 
hensible to our blunter races. 

Americans new to France, and seeing it first 
in war-time, will be continually led to over- 
look the differences and see the resemblances 
between the two countries. They will notice, 
for instance, that the same kind of people who 
pack the music-halls and "movie-shows" at 
home also pack them in France. But if they 
will take a seat at the one of the French na- 
tional theatres (the Theatre Frangais or the 
Odeon) they will see people of the same level 
of education as those of the cinema-halls en- 
joying with keen discrimination a tragedy by 
Racine or a drama of Victor Hugo's. In 



68 French Ways and Their Meaning 

America the "movie" and music-hall audi- 
ences require no higher form of nourishment. 
In France they do, and the Thursday mat- 
inees in theatres which give the classic drama 
are as packed as the house where "The Mys- 
teries of New York" are unrolled, while on 
the occasion of the free performances given 
on national holidays in these theatres a line 
composed of working-people, poor students 
and all kinds of modest wage-earners forms 
at the door hours before the performance be- 
gins. 

The people who assist at these great tragic 
performances have a strong enough sense of 
reality to understand the part that grief and 
calamity play in life and in art: they feel 
instinctively that no real art can be based on 
a humbugging attitude toward life, and it is 
their intellectual honesty which makes them 
exact and enjoy its fearless representation. 

It is also their higher average of education, 
of "culture" it would be truer to say, if the 
word, with us, had not come to stand for the 



Intellectual Honesty 69 



pretence rather than the reality. Education 
in its elementary sense is much more general 
in America than in France. There are more 
people who can read in the United States ; but 
what do they read? The whole point, as far 
as any real standard goes, is there. If the abil- 
ity to read carries the average man no higher 
than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks 
nothing more nourishing out of books and the 
theatre than he gets in hanging about the store, 
the bar and the street-corner, then culture is 
bound to be dragged down to him instead of 
his being lifted up by culture. 

Ill 

The very significance — the note of ridicule 
and slight contempt — ^which attaches to the 
word ''culture" in America, would be quite 
unintelligible to the French of any class. It 
is inconceivable to them that any one should 
consider it superfluous, and even slightly 
comic, to know a great deal, to know the best 



70 French Ways and Their Meaning 

'■'-■'' ' ' "i 

in every line, to know, in fact, as much as pos- 
sible. 

There are ignorant and vulgar-minded peo- 
ple in France, as in other countries; but in- 
stead of dragging the popular standard of cul- 
ture down to their own level, and ridiculing 
knowledge as the affectation of a self-con- 
scious clique, they are obliged to esteem it, to 
pretend to have it, and to try and talk its lan- 
guage — which is not a bad way of beginning 
to acquire it. 

The odd Anglo-Saxon view that a love of 
beauty and an interest in ideas imply effem- 
inacy is quite unintelligible to the French ; as 
unintelligible as, for instance, the other notion 
that athletics make men manly. 

The French would say that athletics make 
men muscular, that education makes them effi- 
cient, and that what makes them manly is their 
general view of life, or, in other words, the 
completeness of their intellectual honesty. 
And the conduct of Frenchmen during the 
last four and a half years looks as though there 



Intellectual Honesty 71 



were something to be said in favour of this 
opinion. 

The French are persuaded that the enjoy- 
ment of beauty and the exercise of the critical 
intelligence are two of the things best worth 
living for; and the notion that art and knowl- 
edge could ever, in a civilised state, be re- 
garded as negligible, or subordinated to 
merely material interests, would never occur 
to them. It does not follow that everything 
they create is beautiful, or that their ideas are 
always valuable or interesting; what matters 
is the esteem in which the whole race holds 
ideas and their noble expression. 

Theoretically, America holds art and ideas 
in esteem also; but she does not, as a people, 
seek or desire them. This indifference is 
partly due to awe: America has not lived long 
at her ease with beauty, like the old European 
races whose art reaches back through an un- 
broken inheritance of thousands of years of 
luxury and culture. 

It would have been unreasonable to expect 



72 French Ways and Their Meaning 

a new country, plunged in the struggle with 
material necessities, to create an art of her 
own, or to have acquired familiarity enough 
with the great arts of the past to feel the need 
of them as promoters of enjoyment, or to un- 
derstand their value as refining and civilising 
influences. But America is now ripe to take 
her share in the long inheritance of the races 
she descends from; and it is a pity that just 
at this time the inclination of the immense 
majority of Americans is setting away from all 
real education and real culture. 

Intellectual honesty was never so little in? 
respect in the United States as in the years be- 
fore the war. Every sham and substitute for 
education and literature and art had steadily 
crowded out the real thing. ''Get-rich-quick" 
is a much less dangerous device than ^'get- 
educated-quick," but the popularity of the 
first has led to the attempt to realise the sec- 
ond. It is possible to get rich quickly in a 
country full of money-earning chances; but 
there is no short-cut to education. 



■as 



Intellectual Honesty 73 



Perhaps it has been an advantage to the 
French to have had none of our chances of 
sudden enrichment. Perhaps the need of ac- 
cumulating money slov^ly leads people to be 
content with less, and consequently gives them 
more leisure to care for other things. There 
could be no greater error — as all Americans 
(know — than to think that America's ability to 
make money quickly has made her heedless of 
ether values; but it has set the pace for the 
pursuit of those other values, a pursuit that 
leads to their being trampled underfoot in the 
general rush for them. 

The French, at any rate, living more slowly, 
have learned the advantage of living more 
deeply. In science, in art, in technical and 
industrial training, they know the need of tak- 
ing time, and the wastefulness of superficial- 
ity. French university education is a long 
and stern process, but it produces minds ca- 
pable of more sustained effort and a larger 
range of thought than our quick doses of learn- 
ing. And this strengthening discipline of the 



74 French Ways and Their Meaning 

mind has preserved the passion for intellec- 
tual honesty. No race is so little addicted to 
fads, for fads are generally untested proposi- 
tions. The French tendency is to test every 
new theory, religious, artistic or scientific, in 
the light of wide knowledge and experience, 
and to adopt it only if it stands this scrutiny. 
It is for this reason that France has so few 
religions, so few philosophies, and so few 
quick cures for mental or physical woes. And 
it is for this reason also that there are so few 
advertisements in French newspapers. 

Nine-tenths of English and American ad- 
vertising is based on the hope that some one 
has found a way of doing something, or curing 
some disease, or overcoming some infirmity, 
more quickly than by the accepted methods. 
The French are too incredulous of short-cuts 
and nostrums to turn to such promises with 
much hope. Their unshakeable intellectual 
honesty and their sound intellectual training 
lead them to distrust any way but the strait 
and narrow one when a difficulty is to be rnas- 



Intellectual Honesty 75 

'■■'■' . ■ 

tered or an art acquired. They are above all 
democratic in their steady conviction that 
there is no "royal road" to the worth-while 
things, and that every yard of the Way to 
Wisdom has to be travelled on foot, and not 
spun over in a joy-ride. 



CONTINUITY 

I 

HAVE you ever watched the attempt of 
any one who does not know how to 
draw to put down on paper the 
roughest kind of representation of a house or 
a horse or a human being? 

The difficulty and perplexity (to any one 
not born with the drawing instinct) caused 
by the effort of reproducing an object one can 
walk around are extraordinary and unex- 
pected. The thing is there, facing the 
draughtsman, the familiar everyday thing — 
and a few strokes on paper ought to give at 
least a recognisable suggestion of it. 

But what kind of strokes ? And what curves 

or angles ought they to follow? Try and see 

for yourself, if you have never been taught 

76 



Continuity -j'-j 



to draw, and if no instinct tells you how. Evi- 
dently there is some trick about it which must 
be learned. 

It takes a great deal of training and obser- 
vation to learn the trick and represent recog- 
nisably the simplest three-dimensional thing, 
much less an animal or a human being in 
movement. And it takes a tradition too: it 
presupposes the existence of some one capable 
of handing on the trick, which has already 
been handed on to him. 

Thirty thousand years ago — or perhaps 
more — there were men in France so advanced 
in observation and training of eye and hand 
that they could represent fishes swimming in 
a river, stags grazing or fighting, bison charg- 
ing with lowered heads or lying down and 
licking their own shoulders — could even rep- 
resent women dancing in a round, and long 
lines of reindeer in perspective, with horns 
gradually diminishing in size. 

It is only twenty years ago that the first 
cavern decorated \Yith prehistoric paintings 



78 French Ways and Their Meaning 

was discovered at Altamira, in north-western 
Spain. Its discoverer was regarded with sus- 
picion and contempt by the archaeologists of 
the period: they let him see that they thought 
him an impostor and he died without having 
been able to convince the learned world that 
he had not had a hand in decorating the roof 
of the cave of Altamira with its wonderful 
troops of inter-glacial animals. But ten or 
twelve years later the discovery of similar 
painted caves in all directions north and south 
of the Pyrenees at last vindicated Senor Sau- 
tola's sincerity, and set the students of civilisa- 
tion hastily revising their chronologies; and 
since then proofs of the consummate skill of 
these men of the dawn have been found on the 
walls of caves and grottoes all over central and 
southern France, throughout the very region 
where our American soldiers have been camp- 
ing, and where our convalescents are now 
basking in the warm Mediterranean sun. 

The study of prehistoric art is just begin- 
ning, but already it has been found that draw- 



Continuity 79 



ing, painting and even sculpture of a highly 
developed kind were practised in France long 
before Babylon rose in its glory, or the foun- 
dations of the undermost Troy were laid. In 
fact, all that is known of the earliest historic 
civilisations is recent in date compared with 
the wonderful fore-shortened drawings and 
clay statues of the French Stone Age. 

The traces of a very ancient culture discov- 
ered in the United States and in Central 
America prove the far-off existence of an ar- 
tistic and civic development unknown to the 
races found by the first European explorers. 
But the origin and date of these vanished 
societies are as yet unguessed at, and even were 
it otherwise they would not count in our ar- 
tistic and social inheritance, since the English 
and Dutch colonists found only a wilderness 
peopled by savages, who had kept no link of 
memory with those vanished societies. There 
had been a complete break of continuity. 



8o French Ways and Their Meaning 

II 

In France it was otherwise. 

Any one who really wants to understand 
France must bear in mind that French culture 
is the most homogeneous and uninterrupted 
culture the world has known. It is true that 
waves of invasion, just guessed at on the verge 
of the historic period, must have swept away 
the astounding race who adorned the caves of 
central and south-western France with draw- 
ings matching those of the Japanese in sup- 
pleness and audacity; for after that far-off 
flowering time the prehistorian comes on a 
period of retrogression when sculptor and 
draughtsman fumbled clumsily with their im- 
plements. The golden age of prehistory was 
over. Waves of cold, invasions of savage 
hordes, all the violent convulsions of a world 
in the making, swept over the earliest France 
and almost swept her away: almost, but not 
quite. Soon, Phoenicia and Greece were to 
reach her from the south, soon after that Rome 
was to stamp her once for all with the stamp 



Continuity 8i 



of Roman citizenship; and in the intervals 
between these events the old, almost vanished 
culture doubtless lingered in the caves and 
river-beds, handed on something of its great 
tradition, kept alive, in the hidden nooks 
v^hich cold and savages spared, little hearths 
of artistic vitality. 

It v^Duld appear that all the v^hile people 
went on obscurely modelling clay, carving 
horn and scratching drawings on the walls of 
just such river-cliff houses as the peasants of 
Burgundy live in to this day, thus nursing 
the faint embers of tradition that were to leap 
into beauty at the touch of Greece and Rome. 
And even if it seems fanciful to believe that 
the actual descendants of the cave-painters 
survived there can be little doubt that their 
art, or its memory, was transmitted. If even 
this link with the past seems too slight to be 
worth counting, the straight descent of French 
civilisation from the ancient Mediterranean 
culture which penetrated her by the Rhone 
and Spain and the Alps would explain the 



82 French Ways and Their Meaning 

ripeness and the continuity of her social life. 
By her geographic position she seemed des- 
tined to centralise and cherish the scattered 
fires of these old societies. 

What is true of plastic art must of course 
be true of the general culture it implies. The 
people of France went on living in France, 
surviving cataclysms, perpetuating traditions, 
handing dov^n and down and down certain 
ways of ploughing and sowing and vine-dress- 
ing and dyeing and tanning and working and 
hoarding, in the same valleys and on the same 
river-banks as their immemorially remote 
predecessors. 

Could anything be in greater contrast to 
the sudden uprooting of our American an- 
cestors and their violent cutting o& from all 
their past, when they set out to create a new 
state in a new hemisphere, in a new climate, 
and out of new materials? 

How little the old peasant-tradition of ru- 
ral England lingered among the uprooted col- 
onists, who had to change so abruptly all their 



Continuity 83 



agricultural and domestic habits, is shown in 
the prompt disappearance from our impov- 
erished American vocabulary of nearly all 
the old English words relating to fields and 
woods. What has become, in America, of the 
copse, the spinney, the hedgerow, the dale, 
the vale, the weald? We have reduced all tim- 
ber to ^Voods," and, even that plural appear- 
ing excessive, one hears Americans who ought 
to know better speak of "^ woods," as though 
the familiar word has lost part of its meaning 
to them. 

This instance from our own past — to which 
might be added so many more illustrating the 
deplorable loss of shades of difference in our 
blunted speech — ^will help to show the con- 
trast between a race that has had a long con- 
tinuance and a race that has had a recent be- 
ginning. 

The English and Dutch settlers of North 
America no doubt carried many things with 
them, such vital but imponderable things as 
prejudices, principles, laws and beliefs. But 



84 French Ways and Their Meaning 

even these were strangely transformed when 
at length the colonists emerged again from the 
backwoods and the bloody Indian warfare. 
The stern experience of the pioneer, the neces- 
sity of rapid adaptation and of constantly im- 
provised expedients, formed a far different 
preparation from that dogged resistance to 
invasion, that clinging to the same valley and 
the same river-cliff, that have made the 
French, literally as well as figuratively, the 
most conservative of western races. They also 
had passionate convictions and fierce wants, 
like other peoples trying to organise them- 
selves; but the idea of leaving France in order 
to safeguard their convictions and satisfy their 
wants would never have occurred to the 
French Huguenots if the religious wars of the 
sixteenth century and the Revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes had not made France literally 
uninhabitable. The English Puritans left 
England only to gain greater liberty for the 
independent development of their peculiar 
political and religious ideas; they were not 



Continuity 85 



driven out with fire and sword as the Hugue- 
nots were drivexi from France. 

Why, then, one wonders, did the French 
people cling to France with such tenacity — 
since none are more passionate in their con- 
victions and prejudices where anything short 
of emigration is concerned? They clung to 
France because they loved it, and for such 
sentimental fidelity some old underlying eco- 
nomic reason usually exists. The map of 
France, and the climate of France, show what 
the reason was. France, as her historians 
have long delighted to point out, is a country 
singularly privileged in her formation, and 
in the latitude she occupies. She is magnifi- 
cently fed with great rivers, which flow where 
it is useful for commerce and agriculture that 
they should flow. The lines of her mountain- 
ranges formed natural ramparts in the past, 
and in the south and south-west, serve as great 
wind-screens and sun-reflectors, creating al- 
most tropic corners under a temperate lati- 
tude. Her indented coast opens into many ca- 



86 French Ways and Their Meaning 

pacious and sheltered harbours, and the 
course of the Gulf Stream bends in to soften 
the rainy climate of her great western penin- 
sula, making Brittany almost as warm as the 
sunnier south. 

Above all, the rich soil of France, so pre- 
cious for wheat and corn-growing, is the best 
soil in the world for the vine; and a people 
can possess few more civilising assets than the 
ability to produce good wine at home. It is 
the best safeguard against alcoholism, the best 
incentive to temperance in the manly and 
grown-up sense of the word, which means vol- 
untary sobriety and not legally enforced ab- 
stinence. 

All these gifts France had and the French 
intelligently cherished. Between the Swiss 
snows and the icy winter fogs of Germany on 
the one side, and the mists and rain and per- 
petual dampness of England on the other, her 
cool mild sky shot with veiled sunlight over- 
hung a land of temperate beauty and temper- 
ate wealth. Farther north, man might grow 



Continuity 87 



austere or gross, farther south idle and im- 
provident: France offered the happy mean 
which the poets are forever celebrating, and 
the French were early aware that the poets 
were right. 

Ill 

Satisfaction with a happy mean implies the 
power to choose, the courage to renounce. 

The French had chosen: they chose France. 
They had to renounce; and they renounced 
Adventure. 

Staying in France was not likely to make 
any man inordinately rich in his life-time; 
forsaking France to acquire sudden wealth 
was unthinkable. The Frenchman did not de- 
sire inordinate wealth for himself, but he 
wanted, and was bound to have, material se- 
curity for his children. Therefore the price to 
be paid for staying at home, and keeping one's 
children with one (an absolute necessity to the 
passionately tender French parent), was per- 
petual, sleepless, relentless thrift. The money 



88 French Ways and Their Meaning 



necessary to security had to be accumulated 
slowly and painfully, so the Frenchman 
learned to be industrious, and to train his 
children to industry; and that money had to 
be kept fast hold of, since any profitable in- 
vestment meant Risk. 

Risk and Adventure were the two dreaded 
enemies that might, at a stroke, deprive one 
of the bliss of living in France, or of the mod- 
icum of well-being necessary to live there in 
comfort, as the unluxurious French under- 
stand it. Against Risk and Adventure, there- 
fore, it is the French parent's duty to warn 
and protect his children. Brought up in this 
atmosphere of timidity and distrust of the un- 
known, generation after generation of young 
Frenchmen became saturated with the same 
fears; and those among them who tried to 
break through the strong network of tradition, 
and venture iheir inheritance or their lives in 
quest of new things, were restrained by the 
fierce conservatism of the women and the in- 
sinuating tyranny of French family life. 



Continuity 89 



It is useless to deny that, to Anglo-Saxon 
eyes, the niggardliness of the French is their 
most incomprehensible trait. The reluctance 
to give, the general lack of spontaneous and 
impulsive generosity, even in times of such 
tragic appeal as the war has created, have 
too often astonished and pained those who 
most admire the French character to be passed 
over in any frank attempt to understand it. 

During the most cataclysmic moments of 
the war, when it seemed that a few days or 
weeks might bring the world crashing down 
in ruins, and sweep away all that made life 
tolerable and material ease a thing worth con- 
sidering — even then (though one could of 
course cite individual cases of the noblest gen- 
erosity), the sense of the imprudence of un- 
calculated generosity still prevailed, and in 
France money never poured forth for the re- 
lief of sufifering as it did in England. 

The same clinging to tradition and fear of 
risk which make prudence almost a vice in 
the French are not applied only to money- 



90 French Ways and Their Meaning 

saving. The French too often economise 
manners as they do francs. The discovery is 
disillusionising until one goes back to its 
cause, and learns to understand that, in a so- 
ciety based on caution, and built about an old 
and ineradicable bureaucracy, obsequiousness 
on the one side is sure to breed discourtesy on 
the other. 

No one knows more than the French about 
good manners: manners are codified in 
France, and there is the possibility of an in- 
sult in the least deviation from established 
procedure, such as using the wrong turn in 
signing a note, as, for example, putting 
"Agreez, Monsieur" where "Veuillez agreer, 
Monsieur'' is in order, or substituting "senti- 
ments distingues" for "haute consideration." 
Unfortunately, in the process, the forms of 
courtesy have turned into the sharp-edged me- 
tallic counters of a game, instead of being a 
spontaneous emission of human kindliness. 

The French are kind in the sense of not be- 
ing cruel, but they are not kindly, in the sense 



Continuity 91 



of diffused benevolence which the word im- 
plies to Anglo-Saxons. They are passionate 
and yet calculating, and simple uncalcu- 
lated kindliness — the vague effusion of good- 
will toward unknown fellow-beings — does not 
enter into a plan of life which is as settled, 
ruled off and barricaded as their carefully- 
measured and bounded acres. It savours too 
much of Adventure, and might lead one into 
the outer darknesses of Risk. 

If one makes such a criticism to a French 
friend, in any candid discussion of race-differ- 
ences, the answer is always: ''Of course you 
Anglo-Saxons are more generous, because you 
are so much richer." 

But this explanation, though doubtless sin- 
cere, is not exact. We are more generous not 
because we are richer, but because we are so 
much less afraid of being poor; and if we are 
less afraid of being poor it is due to the fact 
that our ancestors found it much easier to 
make money, not only because they were more 



92 French Ways and Their Meaning 

willing to take risks, but because more oppor- 
tunities came in their way. 

Once these arguments are balanced, it be- 
comes easier to allow for French caution, and 
to overlook it in favour of those other quali- 
ties which their way of life has enabled the 
French to develop. 

IV 

First among these qualities is the power of 
sustained effort, and the sense of its need in 
any worth-while achievement. 

The French, it has already been pointed 
out, have no faith in short-cuts, nostrums or 
dodges of any sort to get around a difBculty. 
This makes them appear backward in the 
practical administration of their aflairs; but 
they make no claim to teach the world practi- 
cal efficiency. What they have to teach is 
something infinitely higher, more valuable, 
more civilising: that in the world of ideas, as 
in the world of art, steady and disinterested 
effort alone can accomplish great things. 



Continuity 93 



It may seem, from what has been said in an 
earlier part of this chapter, as though the 
French were of all people the most interested, 
since questions of money so constantly preoc- 
cupy them. But their thoughts are not occu- 
pied with money-making in itself, as an end 
worth living for, but only with the idea of 
having money enough to be sure of not losing 
their situation in life, for themselves or their 
children; since, little as they care to rise in 
the world, they have an unspeakable terror of 
falling, based partly, no doubt, on the pitiful 
fate, in France, of those who do fall. This 
point assured, they want only enough leisure 
and freedom from material anxiety to enjoy 
what life and the arts of life offer. This ab- 
sence of financial ambition should never be 
lost sight of: it is not only the best clue to the 
French character, but the most useful lesson 
our own people can learn from contact with 
France. 

The requirements of the average French- 
man in any class are surprisingly few, and the 



94 French Ways and Their Meaning 

ambition to "better" himself socially plays a 
very small part in his plans. What he wants 
is leisure to enjoy the fleeting good things of 
life, from which no one knows better how to 
extract a temperate delight, and full liberty 
of mind to discuss general ideas while pur- 
suing whatever trade or art he is engaged in. 
It may seem an exaggeration to ascribe such 
aspirations to the average man of any race; 
but compared with other peoples the distin- 
guishing mark of the Frenchman of all classes 
is the determination to defend his own leisure, 
the taste for the free play of ideas, and the 
power to express and exchange views on ques- 
tions of general interest. 

Great shrewdness and maturity of judgment 
result from this tendency to formulate ideas: 
it is unusual to hear a French peasant or 
working man express an opinion on life that 
is not sagacious. Human nature is a subject 
of absorbing interest to the French, and they 
have, to use their own phrase, "made the tour 
of it," and amply allowed for it in all their 



Continuity 95 



appreciations of life. The artless astonish- 
ment of the northern races in the face of the 
oldest of human phenomena is quite incom- 
prehensible to them. 

This serenity and maturity of view is the 
result of an immensely old inheritance of cul- 
ture; and the first lesson it teaches is that 
Rome was not built in a day. 

Only children think that one can make a 
garden with flowers broken from the plant; 
only inexperience imagines that novelty is al- 
ways synonymous with improvement. To go 
on behaving as if one believed these things, 
and to foster their belief in others, is to en- 
courage the intellectual laziness which rapid 
material prosperity is too apt to develop. It 
is to imprison one's self in a perpetual imma- 
turity. The French express, perhaps uncon- 
sciously, their sense of the weight of their own 
long moral experience by their universal com- 
ment on the American fellows-in-arms whose 
fine qualities*they so fully recognise. ''Ce sont 
des enfants — they are mere children!" is what 



96 French Ways and Their Meaning 

they always say of the young Americans: say 
it tenderly, almost anxiously, like people pas- 
sionately attached to youth and to the young, 
but also with a little surprise at the narrow 
surface of perception which most of these 
young minds offer to the varied spectacle of 
the universe. 

, A new race, working out its own destiny in 
new conditions, cannot hope for the moral and 
intellectual maturity of a race seated at the 
cross-roads of the old civilisations. But 
America has, in part at least, a claim on the 
great general inheritance of Western culture. 
She inherits France through England, and 
Rome and the Mediterranean culture, 
through France. These are indirect and re- 
mote sources of enrichment; but she has di- 
rectly, in her possession and in her keeping, 
the magnificent, the matchless inheritance of 
English speech and English letters. 

Had she had a more mature sense of the 
value of tradition and the strength of con- 
tinuity she would have kept a more reverent 



Continuity 97 



hold upon this treasure, and the culture won 
from it would have been an hundredfold 
greater. She w^ould have preserved the lan- 
guage instead of debasing and impoverishing 
it; she would have learned the historic mean- 
ing of its words instead of wasting her time in- 
venting short-cuts in spelling them; she would 
jealously have upheld the standards of its lit- 
erature instead of lowering them to meet an 
increased ^'circulation." 

In all this, France has a lesson to teach and 
a warning to give. It was our English for- 
bears who taught us to flout tradition and 
break away from their own great inheritance; 
France may teach us that, side by side with 
the qualities of enterprise and innovation that 
English blood has put in us, we should cul- 
tivate the sense of continuity, that "sense of 
the past" which enriches the present and binds 
us up with the world's great stabilising tra- 
ditions of art and poetry and knowledge. 



VI 

THE NEW FRENCHWOMAN 

THERE is no new Frenchwoman; but 
the real Frenchwoman is new to 
America, and it may be of interest to 
American women to learn something of what 
she is really like. 

In saying that the real Frenchwoman is new 
to America I do not intend to draw the old fa- 
miliar contrast between the so-called "real 
Frenchwoman" and the Frenchwoman of fic- 
tion and the stage. Americans have been told 
a good many thousand times in the last four 
years that the real Frenchwoman is totally dif- 
ferent from the person depicted under that 
name by French novelists and dramatists; but 
in truth every literature, in its main lines, re- 
flects the chief characteristics of the people 
for whom, and about whom, it is written — 

q8 



The New Frenchwoman 99 

and none more so than French literature, the 
freest and frankest of all. 

The statement that the real Frenchwoman 
is new to America simply means that America 
has never before taken the trouble to look at 
her and try to understand her. She has always 
been there, waiting to be understood, and a 
little tired, perhaps, of being either carica- 
tured or idealised. It would be easy enough 
to palm her off as a ''new" Frenchwoman be- 
cause the war has caused her to live a new 
life and do unfamiliar jobs ; but one need only 
look at the illustrated papers to see what she 
looks like as a tram-conductor, a taxi-driver or 
a munition-maker. It is certain, even now, 
that all these new experiences are going to 
modify her character, and to enlarge her view 
of life; but that is not the point with which 
these papers are concerned. The first thing 
for the American woman to do is to learn to 
know the Frenchwoman as she has always 
been; to try to find out what she is, and why 
she is what she is. After that it will be easy to 



loo French Ways and Their Meaning 

see why the war has developed in her certain 
qualities rather than others, and what its after- 
effects on her are likely to be. 

First of all, she is, in nearly all respects, as 
different as possible from the average Ameri- 
can woman. That proposition is fairly evi- 
dent, though not always easy to explain. Is it 
because she dresses better, or knows more 
about cooking, or is more "coquettish," or 
more "feminine," or more excitable, or more 
emotional, or more immoral? All these rea- 
sons have been often suggested, but none of 
them seems to furnish a complete answer. 
Millions of American women are, to the best 
of their ability (which is not small), coquet- 
tish, feminine, emotional, and all the rest of 
it; a good many dress as well as Frenchwo- 
men ; some even know a little about cooking — 
and the real reason is quite different, and not 
nearly as flattering to our national vanity. It 
is simply that, like the men of her race, the 
Frenchwoman is grown up. 

Compared with the women of France the 



The New Frenchwoman ioi 



average American woman is still in the kin- 
dergarten. The world she lives in is exactly 
like the most improved and advanced and 
scientifically equipped Montessori-method 
baby-school. At first sight it may seem pre- 
posterous to compare the American woman's 
independent and resonant activities — her 
"boards" and clubs and sororities, her public 
investigation of everything under the heavens 
from "the social evil" to baking-powder, and 
from "physical culture" to the newest esoteric 
religion — to compare such free and busy and 
seemingly influential lives with the artless ex- 
ercises of an infant class. But what is the fun- 
damental principle of the Montessori system? 
It is the development of the child's individu- 
ality, unrestricted by the traditional nursery 
discipline: a Montessori school is a baby 
world where, shut up together in the most im- 
proved hygienic surroundings, a number of 
infants noisily develop their individuality. 

The reason why American women are not 
really "grown up" in comparison with the 



I02 French Ways and Their Meaning 

C" ' f 

women of the most highly civilised countries 
— such as France — is that all their semblance 
of freedom, activity and authority bears not 
much more likeness to real living than the ex- 
ercises of the Montessori infant. Real living, 
in any but the most elementary sense of the 
word, is a deep and complex and slowly-de- 
veloped thing, the outcome of an old and rich 
social experience. It cannot be "got up" like 
gymnastics, or a proficiency in foreign lan- 
guages; it has its roots in the fundamental 
things, and above all in close and constant and 
interesting and important relations between 
men and women. 

It is because American women are each oth- 
er's only audience, and to a great extent each 
other's only companions, that they seem, com- 
pared to women who play an intellectual and 
social part in the lives of men, like children 
in a baby-school. They are "developing their 
individuality," but developing it in the void, 
without the checks, the stimulus, and the dis- 
cipline that comes of contact with the stronger 



The New Frenchwoman io'^ 



masculine individuality. And it is not only 
because the man is the stronger and the closer 
to reality that his influence is necessary to de- 
velop woman to real womanhood; it is be- 
cause the two sexes complete each other men- 
tally as well as physiologically that no modern 
civilisation has been really rich or deep, or 
stimulating to other civilisations, which has 
not been based on the recognised interaction 
of influences between men and women. 

There are several ways in which the 
Frenchwoman's relations with men may be 
called more important than those of her Amer- 
ican sister. In the first place, in the commer- 
cial class, the Frenchwoman is always her 
husband's business partner. The lives of the 
French bourgeois couple are basea on the pri- 
mary necessity of getting enough money to live 
on, and of giving their children educational 
and material advantages. In small businesses 
the woman is always her husband's book- 
keeper or clerk, or both; above all, she is his 
business adviser. France, as you know, is held 



I04 French Ways and Their Meaning 

up to all other countries as a model of thrift, 
of wise and prudent saving and spending. No 
other country in the world has such immense 
financial vitality, such powers of recuperation 
from national calamity. After the Franco- 
Prussian war of 1870, when France, beaten to 
earth, her armies lost, half her territory occu- 
pied, and with all Europe holding aloof, and 
not a single ally to defend her interests — when 
France v/as called on by her conquerors to pay 
an indemnity of five thousand million francs 
in order to free her territory of the enemy, she 
raised the sum, and paid it off, eighteen 
months sooner than the date agreed upon: to 
the rage and disappointment of Germany, and 
the amazement and admiration of the rest of 
the world. 

Every economist knows that if France was 
able to make that incredible effort it was be- 
cause, all over the country, millions of French- 
women, labourers' wives, farmers' wives, small 
shopkeepers' wives, wives of big manufactur- 
ers and commission-merchants and bankers, 



The New Frenchwoman io^ 



were to all intents and purposes their hus- 
bands' business-partners, and had had a direct 
interest in saving and investing the millions 
and millions piled up to pay France's ransom 
in her day of need. At every stage in French 
history, in war, in politics, in literature, in art 
and in religion, women have played a splen- 
did and a decisive part; but none more splen- 
did or more decisive than the obscure part 
played by the millions of wives and mothers 
whose thrift and prudence silently built up 
her salvation in 1872. 

When it is said that the Frenchwoman of 
the middle class is her husband's business 
partner the statement must not be taken in too 
literal a sense. The French wife has less le- 
gal independence than the American or Eng- 
lish wife, and is subject to a good many legal 
disqualifications from which women have 
freed themselves in other countries. That is 
the technical situation; but what is the prac- 
tical fact? That the Frenchwoman has gone 
straight through these theoretical restrictions 



io6 French Ways and Their Meaning 



to the heart of reality, and become her hus- 
band's associate, because, for her children's 
sake if not for her own, her heart is in his job, 
and because he has long since learned that 
the best business partner a man can have is one 
who has the same interests at stake as himself. 
It is not only because she saves him a sales- 
man's salary, or a book-keeper' salary, or both, 
that the French tradesman associates his wife 
with his business ; it is because he has the sense 
to see that no hired assistant will have so keen 
a perception of his interests, that none will re- 
ceive his customers so pleasantly, and that 
none will so patiently and willingly work over 
hours when it is necessary to do so. There is 
no drudgery in this' kind of partnership, be- 
cause it is voluntary, and because each part- 
ner is stimulated by exactly the same aspira- 
tions. And it is this practical, personal and 
daily participation in her husband's job that 
makes the Frenchwoman more grown up than 
others. She has a more interesting and more 



The New Frenchwoman 107 



living life, and therefore she develops more 
quickly. 

It may be objected that money-making is 
not the most interesting thing in life, and that 
the "higher ideals" seem to have little place 
in this conception of feminine efBciency. The 
answer to such a criticism is to be found by 
considering once more the difference be- 
tween the French and the American views as 
to the main object of money-making — a point 
to which any study of the two races inevitably 
leads one back. 

Americans are too prone to consider money- 
making as interesting in itself: they regard 
the fact that a man has made money as some- 
thing intrinsically meritorious. But money- 
making is interesting only in proportion as its 
object is interesting. If a man piles up mil- 
lions in order to pile them up, having already 
all he needs to live humanly and decently, his 
occupation is neither interesting in itself, nor 
conducive to any sort of real social develop- 
ment in the money-maker or in those about 



io8 French Ways and Their Meaning 

him. No life is more sterile than one into 
which nothing enters to balance such an out- 
put of energy. To see how different is the 
French view of the object of money-making 
one must put one's self in the place of the 
average French household. For the immense 
majority of the French it is a far more modest 
ambition, and consists simply in the effort to 
earn one's living and put by enough for sick- 
ness, old age, and a good start in life for the 
children. 

This conception of ^'business" may seem a 
tame one to Americans ; but its adviintages are 
worth considering. In the first place, it has 
the immense superiority of leaving time for 
living, time for men and women both. The 
average French business man at the end of his 
life may not have made as much money as the 
American; but meanwhile he has had, every 
day, something the American has not had: 
Time. Time, in the middle of the day, to sit 
down to an excellent luncheon, to eat it quietly 
with his family, and to read his paper after- 



The New Frenchwoman 109 



ward ; time to go off on Sundays and holidays 
on long pleasant country rambles; time, al- 
most any day, to feel fresh and free enough 
for an evening at the theatre, after a dinner as 
good and leisurely as his luncheon. And there 
is one thing certain : the great mass of men and 
women grow up and reach real maturity only 
through their contact with the material reali- 
ties of living, with business, with industry, 
with all the great bread-winning activities; 
but the growth and the maturing take place 
in the intervals between these activities: and 
in lives where there are no such intervals there 
will be no real growth. 

That is why the ''slow" French business 
methods so irritating to the American busi- 
ness man produce, in the long run, results 
which he is often the first to marvel at and 
admire. Every intelligent American who has 
seen something of France and French life has 
had a first moment of bewilderment on trying 
to explain the seeming contradiction between 
the slow, fumbling, timid French business 



no French Ways and Their Meaning 

methods and the rounded completeness of 
French civilisation. How is it that a country 
which seems to have almost everything to 
learn in the way of ^'up-to-date" business has 
almost everything to teach, not only in the 
way of art and literature, and all the graces of 
life, but also in the way of municipal order, 
state administration, agriculture, forestry, en- 
gineering, and the whole harmonious running 
of the vast national machine? The answer is 
the last the American business man is likely to 
think of until he has had time to study France 
somewhat closely: it is that France is what she 
is because every Frenchman and every French- 
woman takes time to live, and has an extraor- 
dinarily clear and sound sense of what consti- 
tutes real living. 

We are too ready to estimate business suc- 
cesses by their individual results: a point of 
view revealed in our national awe of large 
fortunes. That is an immature and even 
childish way of estimating success. In terms 
of civilisation it is the total and ultimate re- 



The New Frenchwoman hi 

suit of a nation's business effort that matters, 
not the fact of Mr. Smith's being able to build 
a marble villa in place of his wooden cottage. 
If the collective life which results from our 
individual money-making is not richer, more 
interesting and more stimulating than that of 
countries where the individual effort is less 
intense, then it looks as if there were some- 
thing wrong about our method. 

This parenthesis may seem to have wan- 
dered rather far from the Frenchwoman who 
heads the chapter; but in reality she is at its 
very heart. For if Frenchmen care too much 
about other things to care as much as we do 
about making money, the chief reason is 
largely because their relations with women are 
more interesting. The Frenchwoman rules 
French life, and she rules it under a triple 
crown, as a business woman, as a mother, and 
above all as an artist. To explain the sense in 
which the last word is used it is necessary to 
go back to the contention that the greatness 
of France lies in her sense of the beauty and 



112 French Ways and Their Meaning 

r . i 

importance of living. As life is an art in 
France, so woman is an artist. She does not 
teach man, but she inspires him. As the 
Frenchwoman of the bread-winning class in- 
fluences her husband, and inspires in him a 
respect for her judgment and her wishes, so 
the Frenchwoman of the rich and educated 
class is admired and held in regard for other 
qualities. But in this class of society her influ- 
ence naturally extends much farther. The more 
civilised a society is, the wider is the range of 
each woman's influence over men, and of each 
man's influence over women. Intelligent and 
cultivated people of either sex will never lim- 
it themselves to communing with their own 
households. Men and women equally, when 
they have the range of interests that real cul- 
tivation gives, need the stimulus of different 
points of view, the refreshment of new ideas 
as well as of new faces. The long hypocrisy 
which Puritan England handed on to Amer- 
ica concerning the danger of frank and free 
social relations between men and women has 



The New Frenchwoman h-^ 



done more than anything else to retard real 
civilisation in America. 

Real civilisation means an education that 
extends to the whole of life, in contradistinc- 
tion to that of school or college: it means an 
education that forms speech, forms manners, 
forms taste, forms ideals, and above all forms 
judgment. This is the kind of civilisation of 
which France has always been the foremost 
model: it is because she possesses its secret 
that she has led the world so long not only in 
art and taste and elegance, but in ideas and in 
ideals. For it must never be forgotten that if 
the fashion of our note-paper and the cut of 
our dresses come from France, so do the con- 
ceptions of liberty and justice on which our 
republican institutions are based. No nation 
can have grown-up ideas till it has a ruling 
caste of grown-up men and women; and it 
is possible to have a ruling caste of grown-up 
men and women only in a civilisation where 
the power of each sex is balanced by that of 
the other. 



114 French Ways and Their Meaning 

It may seem strange to draw precisely this 
comparison between France, the country of all 
the old sex-conventions, and America, which is 
supposedly the country of the greatest sex- 
freedom; and the American reader may ask: 
"But where is there so much freedom of in- 
tercourse between men and women as in 
America?" The misconception arises from 
the confusion between two words, and two 
states of being that are fundamentally differ- 
ent. In America there is complete freedom 
of intercourse between boys and girls, but not 
between men and women ; and there is a gen- 
eral notion that, in essentials, a girl and a 
woman are the same thing. It is true, in es- 
sentials, that a boy and a man are very much 
the same thing; but a girl and a woman — a 
married woman — are totally different beings. 
Marriage, union with a man, completes and 
transforms a woman's character, her point of 
view, her sense of the relative importance of 
things, far more thoroughly than a boy's na- 
ture is changed by the same experience. A 



The New Frenchwoman ng 

girl is only a sketch; a married woman is the 
finished picture. And it is only the married 
woman who counts as a social factor. 

Now it is precisely at the moment when her 
experience is rounded by marriage, mother- 
hood, and the responsibilities, cares and inter- 
ests of her own household, that the average 
American woman is, so to speak, ^'withdrawn 
from circulation." It is true that this does 
not apply to the small minority of wealthy 
and fashionable women who lead an artificial 
cosmopolitan life, and therefore represent no 
particular national tendency. It is not to them 
that the country looks for the development 
of its social civilisation, but to the average 
woman who is sufHciently free from bread- 
winning cares to act as an incentive to other 
women and as an influence upon men. In 
America this woman, in the immense major- 
ity of cases, has roamed through life in abso- 
lute freedom of communion with young men 
until the day when the rounding-out of her 
own experience by marriage puts her in a po- 



ii6 French Ways and Their Meaning 

sition to become a social influence; and from 
that day she is cut off from men's society in all 
but the most formal and intermittent ways. 
On her wedding-day she ceases, in any open, 
frank and recognised manner, to be an in- 
fluence in the lives of the men of the com- 
munity to which she belongs. 

In France, the case is just the contrary. 
France, hitherto, has kept young girls under 
restrictions at which Americans have often 
smiled, and which have certainly, in some re- 
spects, been a bar to their growth. The do- 
ing away of these restrictions will be one of 
the few benefits of the war : the French young 
girl, even in the most exclusive and most tra- 
dition-loving society, will never again be the 
prisoner she has been in the past. But this is 
relatively unimportant, for the French have 
always recognised that, as a social factor, a 
woman does not count till she is married; and 
in the well-to-do classes girls marry extremely 
young, and the married woman has always had 
extraordinary social freedom. The famous 



The New Frenchwoman 117 



French "Salon," the best school of talk and of 
ideas that the modern world has known, was 
based on the belief that the most stimulating 
conversation in the world is that between intel- 
ligent men and women who see each other of- 
ten enough to be on terms of frank and easy 
friendship. The great wave of intellectual 
and social liberation that preceded the French 
revolution and prepared the way, not for its 
horrors but for its benefits, originated in the 
drawing-rooms of French wives and mothers, 
who received every day the most thoughtful 
and the most brilliant men of the time, who 
shared their talk, and often directed it. Think 
what an asset to the mental life of any country 
such a group of women forms! And in 
France they were not then, and they are not 
now, limited to the small class of the wealthy, 
and fashionable. In France, as soon as a wo- 
man has a personality, social circumstances 
permit her to make it felt. What does it mat- 
ter if she had spent her girlhood in seclusion, 
provided she is free to emerge from it at the 



ii8 French Ways and Their Meaning 

moment when she is fitted to become a real 
factor in social life? 

It may, of course, be asked at this point, 
how the French freedom of intercourse be- 
tween married men and women affects domes- 
tic life, and the happiness of a woman's hus- 
band and children. It is hard to say what 
kind of census could be devised to ascertain 
the relative percentage of happy marriages in 
the countries where different social systems 
prevail. Until such a census can be taken, it 
is, at any rate, rash to assert that the French 
system is less favourable to domestic happi- 
ness than the Anglo-Saxon. At any rate, it 
acts as a greater incentive to the husband, since 
it rests with him to keep his wife's admiration 
and affection by making himself so agreeable 
to her, and by taking so much trouble to ap- 
pear at an advantage in the presence of her 
men friends, that no rival shall supplant him. 
It would not occur to any Frenchman of the 
cultivated class to object to his wife's friend- 
ship with other men, and the mere fact that 



The New Frenchwoman 119 

he has the influence of other men to compete 
with is likely to conduce to considerate treat- 
ment of his wife, and courteous relations in 
the household. 

It must also be remembered that a man who 
comes home to a wife who has been talking 
with intelligent men will probably find her 
companionship more stimulating than if she 
has spent all her time with other women. No 
matter how intelligent women are individ- 
ually, they tend, collectively, to narrow down 
their interests, and take a feminine, or even a 
female, rather than a broadly human view of 
things. The woman whose mind is attuned 
to men's minds has a much larger view of the 
world, and attaches much less importance to 
trifles, because men, being usually brought by 
circumstances into closer contact with reality, 
insensibly communicate their breadth of view 
to women. A "man's woman" is never fussy 
and seldom spiteful, because she breathes too 
free an air, and is having too good a time. 

If, then, being "grown up" consists in hav- 



I20 French Ways and Their Meaning 

ing a larger and more liberal experience of 
life, in being less concerned with trifles, and 
less afraid of strong feelings, passions and 
risks, then the French woman is distinctly 
more grown up than her American sister; and 
she is so because she plays a much larger and 
more interesting part in men^s lives. 

It may, of course, also be asked whether the 
fact of playing this part — which implies all 
the dangers implied by taking the open seas 
instead of staying in port — whether such a 
fact is conducive to the eventual welfare of 
woman and of society. Well — the answer to- 
day is: France! Look at her as she has stood 
before the world for the last four years and a 
half, uncomplaining, undiscouraged, un- 
daunted, holding up the banner of liberty: 
liberty of speech, liberty of thought, liberty 
of conscience, all the liberties that we of the 
western world have been taught to revere as 
the only things worth living for — look at her, 
as the world has beheld her since August, 
19 14, fearless, tearless, indestructible, in face 



The New Frenchwoman 121 

of the most ruthless and formidable enemy the 
world has ever known, determined to fight on 
to the end for the principles she has always 
lived for. Such she is to-day; such are the 
millions of men- who have spent their best 
years in her trenches, and the millions of 
brave, uncomplaining, self-denying mothers 
and wives and sisters who sent them forth 
smiling, who waited for them patiently and 
courageously, or who are mourning them si- 
lently and unflinchingly, and not one of whom, 
at the end of the most awful struggle in his- 
tory, is ever heard to say that the cost has been 
too great or the trial too bitter to be borne. 

No one who has seen Frenchwomen since 
the war can doubt that their great influence 
on French life, French thought, French imag- 
ination and French sensibility, is one of the 
strong:est elements in the attitude that France 
holds before the world to-day. 




VII 
IN CONCLUSION 



NE of the best ways of finding out 
why a race is what it is, is to pick out 
the words that preponderate in its 
speech and its literature, and then* try to define 
the special meaning it gives them. 

The French people are one of the most 
ascetic and the most laborious in Europe; 
yet the four words that preponderate in 
French speech and literature are: Glory, love, 
voluptuousness, and pleasure. Before the 
Puritan reflex causes the reader to fling aside 
the page polluted by this statement, it will be 
worth his while to translate these four words 
into la gloire, F am our, la volupte, le plaisir, 
and then (if he knows French and the French 
well enough) consider what they mean in the 



122 



I 



Conclusion 123 



language of Corneille and Pascal. For it 
must be understood that they have no equiva- 
lents in the English consciousness, and that, if 
it were sought to explain the fundamental dif- 
ference between the exiles of the Mayflower 
and the conquerors of Valmy and Jena, it 
would probably best be illustrated by the to- 
tally different significance of '^love and glory" 
and "amour et gloire." 

To begin with "la gloire": we must resign 
ourselves to the fact that we do not really 
know what the French mean when they say 
it — what, for instance, Montesquieu had in 
mind when he wrote of Sparta: "The only 
object of the Lacedaemonians was liberty, the 
only advantage it gave them was glory." At 
best, if we are intelligent and sympathetic 
enough to have entered a little way into the 
French psychology, we know that they mean 
something infinitely larger, deeper and sub- 
tler than we mean by "glory." The proof is 
that the Anglo-Saxon is taught not to do great 
deeds for "glory," while the French, unsur- 



124 French Ways and Their Meaning 
I . ... = 

passed in great deeds, have always avowedly 
done them for ^4a gloire." 

It is obvious that the sense of duty has a 
large part in the French conception of glory: 
perhaps one might risk defining it as duty with 
a panache. But that only brings one to an- 
other untranslatable word. To put a panache 
— a plume, an ornament — on a prosaic deed is 
an act so eminently French that one seeks in 
vain for its English.equivalent; it would verge 
on the grotesque to define '^la gloire" as duty 
wearing an aigrette! The whole conception 
of '4a gloire" is linked with the profoundly 
French conviction that the lily should be 
gilded; that, however lofty and beautiful a 
man's act or his purpose, it gains by being per- 
formed with what the French (in a word 
which for them has no implication of effemi- 
nacy) call "elegance." Indeed, the higher, 
the more beautiful, the gesture or the act, the 
more it seems to them to call for adornment, 
the more it gains by being given relief. And 
thus, by the very appositeness of the word 



Conclusion 125 



relief, one is led to perceive that '4a gloire" as 
an incentive to high action is essentially the 
conception of a people in v^hom the plastic 
sense has always prevailed. The idea of '^dy- 
ing in beauty" certainly originated with the 
Latin race, though a Scandinavian play- 
wright was left, incongruously enough, to find 
a phrase for it. 

The case is the same with "love" and 
''amour" ; but here the difference is more visi- 
ble, and the meaning of ''amour" easier to 
arrive at. Again, as with "gloire," the con- 
tent is greater than that of our "love." 
"Amour," to the French, means the undivided 
total of the complex sensations and emotions 
that a man and a woman may inspire in each 
other; whereas "love," since the days of the 
Elizabethans, has never, to Anglo-Saxons, 
been more than two halves of a word — one 
half all purity and poetry, the other all pruri- 
ency and prose. And gradually the latter half 
has been discarded, as too unworthy of asso- 
ciation with the loftier meanings of the word, 



126 French Ways and Their Meaning 

and '4ove" remains — at least in the press and 
in the household — a relation as innocuous, and 
as undisturbing to social conventions and busi- 
ness routine, as the tamest ties of consan- 
guinity. 

Is it not possible that the determination to 
keep these two halves apart has diminished 
the one and degraded the other, to the loss of 
human nature in the round? The Anglo- 
Saxon answer is, of course, that love is not li- 
cense; but what meaning is left to ''love" in a 
society where it is supposed to determine mar- 
riage, and yet to ignore the transiency of sex- 
ual attraction? At best, it seems to designate 
a boy-and-girl fancy not much more mature 
than a taste for dolls or marbles. In the light 
of that definition, has not license kept the bet- 
ter part? 

It may be argued that human nature is ev- 
erywhere fundamentally the same, and that, 
though one race lies about its deepest impulses, 
while another speaks the truth about them, the 
result in conduct is not very different. Is 



Conclusion 127 



either of these affirmations exact? If human 
nature, at bottom, is everywhere the same, such 
deep layers of different habits, prejudices, and 
beliefs have been formed above its founda- 
tion that it is rather misleading to test resem- 
blances by what one digs up at the roots. Sec- 
ondary motives of conduct are widely diver- 
gent in dif^ferent countries, and they are the 
motives that control civilised societies except 
when some catastrophe throws them back to 
the state of naked man. 

To understand the difference between the 
Latin and the Anglo-Saxon idea of love one 
must first of all understand the difference be- 
tween the Latin and Anglo-Saxon conceptions 
of marriage. In a society where marriage is 
supposed to be determined solely by recipro- 
cal inclination, and to bind the contracting 
parties not only to a social but to a physical 
lifelong loyalty, love, which never has ac- 
cepted, and never will accept, such bonds, im- 
mediately becomes a pariah and a sinner. 
This is the Anglo-Saxon point of view. How 



128 French Ways and Their Meaning 

many critics of the French conception of love 
have taken the trouble to consider first their 
idea of marriage? 

Marriage, in France, is regarded as 
founded for the family and not for the hus- 
band and wife. It is designed not to make two 
people individually happy for a longer or 
shorter time, but to secure their permanent 
well-being as associates in the foundation of 
a home and the procreation of a family. Such 
an arrangement must needs be based on what 
is most permanent in human states of feeling, 
and least dependent on the accidents of beauty, 
youth, and novelty. Community of tradition, 
of education, and, above all, of the parental 
feeling, are judged to be the sentiments most 
likely to form a lasting tie between the aver- 
age man and woman; and the French mar- 
riage is built on parenthood, not on passion. 

An illustration of the radical contradiction 
between such a view of marriage and that of 
the English races is found in the following ex- 



Conclusion 129 



tract from a notice of a play lately produced 
(with success) in London: 

^'After two months of marriage a young girl 
discovers that her husband married her be- 
cause he wanted a son. That is enough. She 
ivill have no more to do with him. So he goes 
off to fulfil a mining engagement in Peru, and 
she hides herself in the country. . . ." 

It would be impossible to exaggerate the be- 
wilderment and disgust with which any wife 
or husband in France, whether young or mid- 
dle-aged, would read the cryptic sentences I 
have italicised. "What," they would ask, 
"did the girl suppose he had married her for? 
And what did she want to be married for? 
And what is marriage for, if not for that?" 

The French bride is no longer taken from 
a convent at sixteen to be flung into the arms 
of an unknown bridegroom. As emancipa- 
tion has progressed, the young girl has been 
allowed a voice in choosing her husband ; but 
what is the result? That in ninety-nine cases 
out of a hundred her choice is governed by the 



I30 French Ways and Their Meaning 

same considerations. The notion of marriage 
as a kind of superior business association, 
based on community of class, of political and 
religious opinion, and on a fair exchange of 
advantages (where one, for instance, brings 
money and the other position) , is so ingrained 
in the French social organisation that the mod- 
ern girl accepts it intelligently, just as her 
puppet grandmother bowed to it passively. 

From this important act of life the notion 
of love is tacitly excluded ; not because love is 
thought unimportant, but on account of its 
very importance, and of the fact that it is not 
conceivably to be fitted into any stable asso- 
ciation between man and woman. It is be- 
cause the French have refused to cut love in 
two that they have not attempted to subordi- 
nate it to the organisation of the family. They 
have left it out because there was no room for 
it, and also because it moves to a different 
rhythm, and keeps different seasons. It is be- 
cause they refuse to regard it either as merely 
an exchange of ethereal vows or as a sensual 



Conclusion 131 



gratification; because, on the contrary, they 
believe, with Coleridge, that 

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
All are but ministers of Love, 
And feed his sacred flame," 

that they frankly recognise its right to its own 
place in life. 

What, then, is the place they give to the dis- 
/"urbing element? They treat it — the answer 
might be — as ihe poetry of life. For the 
French, simply because they are the most real- 
istic people in the world, are also the most ro- 
mantic. They have judged that the family 
and the state cannot be built up on poetry, but 
they have not felt that for that reason poetry 
was to be banished from their republic. They 
have decided that love is too grave a matter 
for boys and girls, and not grave enough to 
form the basis of marriage; but in the rela- 
tions between grown people, apart from their 
permanent ties (and in the deepest conscious- 
ness of the French, marriage still remains in- 



132 French Ways and Their Meaning 

dissoluble), they allow it, frankly and amply, 
the part it furtively and shabbily, but no less 
ubiquitously, plays in Puritan societies. 

It is not intended here to weigh the relative 
advantages of this view of life and the other ; 
what has been sought is to state fairly the rea- 
sons why marriage, being taken more seriously 
and less vaguely by the French, there remains 
an allotted place for love in their more pre- 
cisely ordered social economy. Nevertheless, 
it is fairly obvious that, except in a world 
where the claims of the body social are very 
perfectly balanced against those of the body 
individual, to give such a place to passion is 
to risk being submerged by it. A society 
which puts love beyond the law, and then pays 
it such heavy toll, subjects itself to the most 
terrible of Camorras. 

II 

The French are one of the most ascetic races 
in the world; and that is perhaps the reason 
why the meaning they give to the word ^'vo- 



Conclusion i-^;^ 



lupte" is free from the vulgarity of our "vo- 
luptuousness." The latter suggests to most 
people a cross-legged sultan in a fat seraglio; 
"volupte" means the intangible charm that 
imagination extracts from things tangible. 
"Volupte" means the "Ode to the Nightin- 
gale" and the "Ode to a Grecian Urn;" it 
means Romeo and Juliet as well as Antony 
and Cleopatra. But if we have the thing, one 
may ask, what does the word matter? Every 
language is always losing word-values, even 
where the sense of the word survives. 

The answer is that the French sense of 
"volupte" is found only exceptionally in the 
Anglo-Saxon imagination, whereas it is part 
of the imaginative make-up of the whole 
French race. One turns to Shakespeare or 
Keats to find it formulated in our speech; 
in France it underlies the whole view^ of life. 
And this brings one, of course, to the inevi- 
table conclusion that the French are a race of 
creative artists, and that artistic creativeness 
requires first a free play of the mind on all 



134 French Ways and Their Meaning 

the facts of life, and secondly the sensuous sen- 
sibility that sees beyond tangible beauty to the 
aura surrounding it. 

The French possess the quality and have al- 
ways claimed the privilege. And from their 
freedom of view combined with their sensu- 
ous sensibility they have extracted the sensa- 
tion they call ^'le plaisir," which is something 
so much more definite and more evocative 
than what we mean when we speak of pleas- 
ure. "Le plaisir" stands for the frankly per- 
mitted, the freely taken, delight of the senses, 
the direct enjoyment of the fruit of the tree 
called golden. No suggestions of furtive vice 
degrade or coarsen it, because it has, like love, 
its open place in speech and practice. It has 
found its expression in English also, but only 
on the lips of genius: for instance, in the 
^'bursting of joy's grape" in the ''Ode to 
Melancholy" (it is always in Keats that one 
seeks such utterances) ; whereas to the French 
it is part of the general fearless and joyful con- 
tact with life. And that is why it has kept its 



Conclusion 13; 



finer meaning, instead of being debased by in- 
comprehension. 

Ill 

The French are passionate and pleasure- 
loving; but they are above all ascetic and la- 
borious. And it is only out of a union of 
these supposedly contradictory qualities that 
so fine a thing as the French temperament 
could have come. 

The industry of the French is universally 
celebrated; but many — even among their own 
race — might ask what justifies the statement 
that they are ascetic. The fact is, the word, 
which in reality indicates merely a natural in- 
difference to material well-being, has come, 
in modern speech, to have a narrower and a 
penitential meaning. It is supposed to imply 
a moral judgment, whereas it refers only to 
the attitude taken toward the creature com- 
forts. A man, or a nation, may wear home- 
spun and live on locusts, and yet be immod- 
erately addicted to the lusts of the eye and 



136 French Ways and Their Meaning 

of the flesh. Asceticism means the serene 
ability to get on without comfort, and comfort 
is an Anglo-Saxon invention which the Latins 
have never really understood or felt the want 
of. What they need (and there is no relation 
between the needs) is splendour on occasion, 
and beauty and fulness of experience always. 
They do not care for the raw material of sen- 
sation: food must be exquisitely cooked, emo- 
tion eloquently expressed, desire emotionally 
heightened, every experience must be trans- 
muted into terms of beauty before it touches 
their imagination. 

This fastidiousness, this tendency always to 
select and eliminate, and refine their sensa- 
tions, is united to that stoic indifference to 
dirt, discomfort, bad air, damp, cold, and 
whatever Anglo-Saxons describe as "incon- 
venience" in the general organisation of life, 
from the bathroom to the banking system, 
which gives the French leisure of spirit for 
enjoyment, and strength of heart for war. It 
enables, and has always enabled, a people ad- 



Conclusion 1-^7 



dieted to pleasure and unused to the disci- 
pline of sport, to turn at a moment's notice 
into the greatest fighters that history has 
known. All the French need to effect this 
transformation is a "great argument;" once 
the spring of imagination touched, the body 
obeys it with a dash and an endurance that 
no discipline, whether Spartan or Prussian, 
/^ver succeeded in outdoing. 

This fearless and joyful people, so ardently 
individual and so frankly realistic, have an- 
other safeguard against excess in their almost 
Chinese reverence for the ritual of manners. 
It is fortunate that they have preserved, 
through every political revolution, this sense 
of- the importance of ceremony, for they are 
without the compensating respect for the 
rights of others which eases intercourse in 
Anglo-Saxon countries. Any view of the 
French that considers them as possessing the 
instinct of liberty is misleading; what they 
have always understood is equality — a differ- 
ent matter — and even that, as one of the most 



138 French Ways and Their Meaning 

acute among their recent political writers has 
said, "on condition that each man commands." 
Their past history, and above all the geo- 
graphical situation which has conditioned it, 
must be kept in view to understand the French 
indifference to the rights of others, and the 
corrective for that indifference which their ex- 
quisite sense of sociability provides. 

For over a thousand years France has had 
to maintain herself in the teeth of an aggres- 
sive Europe, and to do so she has required a 
strong central government and a sense of so- 
cial discipline. Her great kings were forever 
strengthening her by their resistance to the 
scattered feudal opposition. Richelieu and 
Louis XIV finally broke this opposition, and 
left France united against Europe, but de- 
prived of the sense of individual freedom, and 
needing to feel the pressure of an "administra- 
tion" on her neck. Imagination, intellectual 
energy, and every form of artistic activity, 
found their outlet in social intercourse, and 



Conclusion 139 



France created polite society — one more work 
of art in the long list of her creations. 

The French conception of society is hierar- 
chical and administrative, as her government 
(under whatever name) has so long been. 
Every social situation has its appropriate ges- 
tures and its almost fixed vocabulary, and 
nothing, for example, is more puzzling to 
the French than the fact that the English, a 
race whose civilisation they regard as in some 
respects superior to their own, have only two 
or three ways of beginning and ending their 
letters. 

This ritual view of politeness makes it dif- 
ficult of application in undetermined cases, 
and therefore it often gets left out in emer- 
gencies. The complaint of Anglo-Saxons that, 
in travelling in France, they see little of the 
much-vaunted French courtesy, is not unjus- 
tified. The French are not courteous from 
any vague sense of good-will toward mankind ; 
they regard politeness as a coin with which 
certain things are obtainable, and being no- 



I40 French Ways and Their Meaning 

tably thrifty they are cautious about spending 
it on strangers. But the disillusion of the 
traveller often arises in part from his own ig- 
norance of the most elementary French forms: 
of the ^'Bon jour, Madame," on entering and 
leaving a shop, of the fact that a visitor should 
always, on taking leave, be conducted to the 
outer door, and a gentleman (of the old 
school) bidden not to remain uncovered when 
he stops to speak to a lady in the street; of 
the ''Merci" that should follow every service, 
however slight, the "Apres vous" which makes 
way, with ceremonious insistence, for the per- 
son who happens to be entering a door with 
one. In these respects, Anglo-Saxons, by their 
lack of ''form" (and their lack of perception) , 
are perpetually giving unintentional offence. 
But small social fashions are oddly different 
in different countries and vary absurdly in suc- 
ceeding generations. The French gentleman 
does not uncover in a lift or in a museum, be- 
cause he considers these places as public as the 
street; he does not, after the manner of the 



Conclusion 141 



newest-of-all American, jump up like a Jack- 
in-the-box (and remain standing at attention) 
every time the woman he is calling on rises 
from her seat, because he considers such gym- 
nastics fatal to social ease; but he is shocked 
by the way in which Americans loll and 
sprawl when they are seated, and equally be- 
wildered by their excess of ceremony on some 
occasions, and their startling familiarity on 
others. 

Such misunderstandings are inevitable be- 
tween people of different speech and tradi- 
tions. If French and Americans are both (as 
their newspapers assure us) "democratic," it 
gives a notion of how much the term covers! 
At any rate, in the older race there is a tradi- 
tion of trained and cultivated politeness that 
flowers, at its best, into a simplicity demo- 
cratic in the finest sense. Compared to it, our 
politeness is apt to be rather stagy, as our ease 
is at times a little boorish. 



142 French Ways and Their Meaning 

IV 

It will be remembered that Paolo and 
Francesca are met by Dante just beyond 
the fatal gateway, in what might be called 
the temperate zone of the infernal regions. 
In the society of dangerously agreeable fel- 
low-sinners they "go forever on the accursed 
air," telling their beautiful tale to sympathis- 
ing visitors from above; and as, unlike thb 
majority of mortal lovers, they seem not to 
dread an eternity together, and as they feel 
no exaggerated remorse for their sin, their 
punishment is the mildest in the poet's list of 
expiations. There is all the width of hell 
between the "Divine Comedy" and the "Scar- 
let Letter"! 

Far different is the lot of the dishonest man 
of business and of the traitor to the state. For 
these two offenders against the political and 
social order the ultimate horrors of the pit are 
reserved. The difference between their fate 
and that of the lovers is like that between the 



Conclusion 143 



lot of an aviator in an eternally invulnerable 
aeroplane and of a stoker in the burning hold 
of an eternally torpedoed ship. On this dis- 
tinction betw^^een the two classes of offences — 
the antilegal and the antisocial — the whole 
fabric of Latin morality is based. 

The moralists and theologians of the Mid- 
dle Ages, agitated as no other age has been 
by the problem of death and the life after 
death, worked out the great scheme of moral 
retribution on which the ''Divine Comedy" 
is based. This system of punishment is the 
result of a purely Latin and social concep- 
tion of order. In it individualism has no 
place. It is based on the interests of the fam- 
ily, and of that larger family formed by the 
commune or the state; and it distinguishes, 
implicitly if not outspokenly, between the 
wrong that has far-reaching social conse- 
quences and that which injures only one or 
two persons, or perhaps only the moral sense 
of the offender. 

The French have continued to accept this 



144 French Ways and Their Meaning 

classification of offences. They continue to 
think the sin against the public conscience far 
graver than that against any private person. 
If in France there is a distinction between 
private and business morality it is exactly the 
reverse of that prevailing in America, and 
the French conscience rejects w^ith abhor- 
rence the business complaisances which the 
rigidly virtuous American too often regards 
as not immoral because not indictable. "Busi- 
ness" tends everywhere to subdue its victims 
to what they work in, and it is not meant to 
suggest that every French financier is irre» 
proachable, or that France has not had morb* 
than her share of glaring financial scandals, 
but that among the real French, uncontam- 
inated by cosmopolitan influences, and espe- 
cially in the class of small shopkeepers and in 
the upper bourgeoisie, business probity is 
higher, and above all more sensitive, than in 
America. It is not only, or always, through 
indolence that France has remained back- 
ward in certain forms of efficiency. 



Conclusion 145 



It would be misleading to conclude that 
this sensitiveness is based on a respect for the 
rights of others. The French, it must be re- 
peated, are as a race indifferent to the rights 
of others. In the people and the lower middle 
class (and how much higher up!) the tradi- 
tional attitude is: ^Why should I do my 
neighbour a good turn when he may be getting 
the better of me in some way I haven't found 
out?" The French are not generous, and they 
are not trustful. They do not willingly credit 
their neighbours with sentiments as disinter- 
ested as their own. But deep in their very 
bones is something that was called ^'the point 
of honour" when there was an aristocracy to 
lay exclusive claim to it, but that has, in 
reality, alwa^^s permeated the whole fabric 
of the race. It is just as untranslatable as the 
"panache" into which it has flowered on so 
many immortal battle-fields; and it regulates 
the conscience of one of the most avaricious 
and least compassionate of peoples in their 
business relations, as it regulated the conduct 



146 French Ways and Their Meaning 

I " ■ : 

in the field of the knights of chivalry and of 
the parvenu heroes of Napoleon. 

It all comes back, perhaps, to the extraor- 
dinarily true French sense of values. As a 
people, the French have moral taste, and an 
ear for the "still small voice" ; they know what 
is worth while, and they despise most of the 
benefits that accrue from a clever disregard 
of their own standards. It has been the fash- 
ion among certain of their own critics to in- 
veigh against French "taste" and French 
"measure," and to celebrate the supposed 
lack of these qualities in the Anglo-Saxon 
races as giving a freer play to genius and a 
larger scope to all kinds of audacious enter- 
prise. It is evident that if a new continent 
is to be made habitable, or a new prosody to 
be created, the business "point of honour" in 
the one case, and the French Academy in the 
other, may seriously hamper the task; but in 
the minor transactions of commerce and cul- 
ture perhaps such restrictive influences are 



Conclusion 147 



worth more to civilisation than a mediocre 
license. 



Many years ago, during a voyage in 
the Mediterranean, the yacht on v^hich I 
was cruising was driven by bad weather 
to take shelter in a small harbour on the 
Mainote coast. The country, at the time, was 
not considered particularly safe, and before 
landing we consulted the guide-book to see 
what reception we were likely to meet with. 

This is the answer we found: "The inhabi- 
tants are brave, hospitable, and generous, but 
fierce, treacherous, vindictive, and given to 
acts of piracy, robbery, and wreckage." 

Perhaps the foregoing attempt to define 
some attributes of the French character may 
seem as incoherent as this summary. At any 
rate, the endeavour to strike a balance be- 
tween seemingly contradictory traits disposes 
one to indulgence toward the anonymous stu- 
dent of the Mainotes. 



148 French Ways and Their Meaning 

No civilised race has gone as unerringly as 
the French toward the natural sources of en- 
joyment; none has been so unashamed of 
instinct. Yet none has been more enslaved 
by social conventions, small complicated ob- 
servances based on long-past conditions of life. 
No race has shown more collective mag- 
nanimity on great occasions, more pettiness 
and hardness in small dealings between indi- 
viduals. Of no great people would it be truer 
to say that, like the Mainote tribesmen, they 
are generous and brave, yet fierce and vindic- 
tive. No people are more capable of impro- 
vising greatness, yet more afraid of the least 
initiative in ordinary matters. No people are 
more sceptical and more religious, more real- 
istic and more romantic, more irritable and 
nervous, yet more capable of a long patience 
and a dauntless calm. 

Such are the deductions which the foreign 
observer has made. It would probably take 
kinship of blood to resolve them into a harmo- 
nious interpretation of the French character. 



Conclusion 149 



All that the looker-on may venture is to say: 
Some of the characteristics I have noted seem 
unamiable, others dangerously disintegrating, 
others provokingly unprogressive. But when 
you have summed up the whole you will be 
forced to conclude that as long as enriching 
life is more than preserving it, as long as cul- 
ture is superior to business efficiency, as long 
as poetry and imagination and reverence are 
higher and 'more precious elements of civilisa- 
tion than telephones or plumbing, as long as 
truth is more bracing than hypocrisy, and wit 
more w^holesome than dulness, so long will 
France remain greater than any nation that 
has not her ideals. 

Once again it must be repeated that the best 
answer to every criticism of French weakness 
or French shortcomings is the conclusive one: 
Look at the results! Read her history, study 
her art, follow up the current of her ideas; 
then look about you, and you will see that the 
whole world is full of her spilt glory. 

THE END (1) 



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